excerpts

AREA 51

An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base

ANNIE JACOBSEN

Little, Brown and Company

New York Boston London

Liberated by:

2015.2.17

AREA 51

AN UNCENSORED

MISTOtT or AMIKICA'S

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Table of Contents

Photo Inserts
Copyright Page

For Kevin

Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal
what is now shining in splendor.

—Horace

PROLOGUE

The Secret City

This book is a work of nonfiction. The stories I tell in this narrative are real.
None of the people are invented. Of the seventy-four individuals interviewed for
this book with rare firsthand knowledge of the secret base, thirty-two of them
lived and worked at Area 51.

Area 51 is the nation’s most secret domestic military facility. It is located in
the high desert of southern Nevada, seventy-five miles north of Las Vegas. Its
facilities have been constructed over the past sixty years around a flat, dry lake
bed called Groom Lake. The U.S. government has never admitted it exists.

Key to understanding Area 51 is knowing that it sits inside the largest
government-controlled land parcel in the United States, the Nevada Test and
Training Range . Encompassing 4,687 square miles, this area is just a little
smaller than the state of Connecticut—three times the size of Rhode Island, and
more than twice as big as Delaware. Set inside this enormous expanse is a
smaller parcel of land, 1,350 square miles, called the Nevada Test Site , the only
facility like it in the continental United States. Beginning in 1951, on the orders
of President Harry Truman, 105 nuclear weapons were exploded aboveground at
the site and another 828 were exploded underground in tunnel chambers and
deep, vertical shafts. The last nuclear weapons test on American soil occurred at
the Nevada Test Site on September 23, 1992. The facility contains the largest
amount of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium in the United States not
secured inside a nuclear laboratory.

Area 51 sits just outside the Nevada Test Site, approximately five miles to the
northeast of the northernmost corner, which places it inside the Nevada Test and
Training Range. Because everything that goes on at Area 51, and most of what

goes on at the Nevada Test and Training Range, is classified when it is
happening, this is a book about secrets. Two early projects at Groom Lake have
been declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency: the U-2 spy plane,
declassified in 1998, and the A-12 Oxcart spy plane, declassified in 2007. And
yet in thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports, the name Area 51 is
always redacted, or blacked out. There are only two known exceptions , most
likely mistakes.

This is a book about government projects and operations that have been
hidden for decades, some for good reasons, others for arguably terrible ones, and
one that should never have happened at all. These operations took place in the
name of national security and they all involved cutting-edge science. The last
published words of Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, were
“Science is not everything. But science is very beautiful.” After reading this
book, readers can decide what they think about what Oppenheimer said.

This is a book about black operations, government projects that are secret from
Congress and secret from the people who make up the United States. To
understand how black projects began, and how they continue to function today,
one must start with the creation of the atomic bomb. The men who ran the
Manhattan Project wrote the rules about black operations. The atomic bomb was
the mother of all black projects and it is the parent from which all black
operations have sprung.

Building the bomb was the single most expensive engineering project in the
history of the United States. It began in 1942, and by the time the bomb was
tested, inside the White Sands Proving Ground in the New Mexico high desert
on July 16, 1945, the bomb’s price tag , adjusted for inflation, was
$28,000,000,000. The degree of secrecy maintained while building the bomb is
almost inconceivable. When the world learned that America had dropped an
atomic weapon on Hiroshima, no one was more surprised than the U.S.
Congress, none of whose members had had any idea it was being developed.
Vice President Harry Truman had been equally stunned to learn about the bomb
when he became president of the United States, on April 12, 1945. Truman had
been the chairman of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National
Defense Program when he was vice president, meaning he was in charge of
watching how money was spent during the war, yet he’d had no idea about the
atomic bomb until he became president and the information was relayed to him

by two men : Vannevar Bush, the president’s science adviser, and Henry L.
Stimson, the nation’s secretary of war. Bush was in charge of the Manhattan
Project, and Stimson was in charge of the war.

The Manhattan Project employed two hundred thousand people. It had eighty
offices and dozens of production plants spread out all over the country, including
a sixty-thousand-acre facility in rural Tennessee that pulled more power off the
nation’s electrical grid than New York City did on any given night. And no one
knew the Manhattan Project was there . That is how powerful a black operation
can be.

After the war ended, Congress—the legislators who had been so easily kept
in the dark for two and a half years—was given stewardship of the bomb. It was
now up to Congress to decide who would control its “unimaginable destructive
power.” With the passing of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, a terrifying and
unprecedented new system of secret-keeping emerged. The presidential system
was governed by presidential executive orders regarding national security
information. But the newly created Atomic Energy Commission, formerly
known as the Manhattan Project, was now in charge of regulating the
classification of all nuclear weapons information in a system that was totally
separate from the president’s system. In other words, for the first time in
American history, a federal agency run by civilians, the Atomic Energy
Commission, would maintain a body of secrets classified based on factors other
than presidential executive orders. It is from the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 that
the concept “born classified” came to be . and it was the Atomic Energy
Commission that would oversee the building of seventy thousand nuclear bombs
in sixty-five different sizes and styles. Atomic Energy was the first entity to
control Area 51 —a fact previously undisclosed—and it did so with terrifying
and unprecedented power. One simply cannot consider Area 51’s uncensored
history without addressing this cold, hard, and ultimately devastating truth.

The Atomic Energy Commission’s Restricted Data classification was an even
more terrifying anomaly, something that could originate outside the government
through the “thinking and research of private parties.” In other words, the
Atomic Energy Commission could hire a private company to conduct research
for the commission knowing that the company’s thinking and research would be
born classified and that even the president of the United States would not
necessarily have a need-to-know about it. In 1994, for instance, when President
Clinton created by executive order the Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments to look into secrets kept by the Atomic Energy

Commission, certain records involving certain programs inside and around Area
51 were kept from the president on the grounds that he did not have a need-to-
know . Two of these programs, still classified, are revealed publicly for the first
time in this book.

One of the Atomic Energy Commission’s former classifications officers,
Donald Woodbridge, characterized the term born classified as something that
“givers! the professional classificationist unanswerable authority.” Area 51 lives
on as an example. Of the Atomic Energy Commission’s many facilities across
the nation—it is now called the Department of Energy—the single largest
facility is. and always has been, the Nevada Test Site . Other parts of the Nevada
Test and Training Range would be controlled by the Department of Defense. But
there were gray areas, like Area 51—craggy mountain ranges and flat, dry lake
beds sitting just outside the official borders of the Nevada Test Site and not
controlled by the Department of Defense . These areas are where the most secret
projects were set up. No one had a need-to-know about them.

And for decades, until this book was published, no one would.

CHAPTER ONE

The Riddle of Area SI

Area 51 is a riddle. Very few people comprehend what goes on there, and
millions want to know. To many, Area 51 represents the Shangri-la of advanced
espionage and war fighting systems. To others it is the underworld of aliens and
captured UFOs. The truth is that America’s most famous secret federal facility
was set up in order to advance military science and technology faster and further
than any other foreign power’s in the world. Why it is hidden from the world in
southern Nevada’s high desert within a ring of mountain ranges is the nexus of
the riddle of Area 51.

To enter Area 51 requires a top secret security clearance and an invitation
from the uppermost echelons of U.S. military or intelligence-agency elite. The
secrecy oath that is taken by every individual who visits the base before arriving
there is both sacred and legally binding. For those without an invitation, to get
even the slimmest glimpse of Area 51 requires extraordinary commitment,
including a ten-hour block of time, a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and a pair of
good hiking boots. Through binoculars, from the top of a mountain called
Tikaboo Peak, located twenty-six miles east of Area 51, one can, on occasion,
see a flicker of activity. Daylight hours are bad for viewing because there is too
much atmospheric heat distortion coming off the desert floor to differentiate
airplane hangars from sand. Nighttime is the best time to witness the advanced
technology that defines Area 51. Historically, it has been under the cover of
darkness that secret airplanes and drones are flight-tested before they are sent off
on missions around the world. If you stand on Tikaboo Peak in the dead of night
and look out across the darkened valley for hours, suddenly, the Area 51 runway
lights may flash on. An aircraft slides out from inside a hangar and rolls up to its

temporarily illuminated runway. After a brief moment, it takes off, but by the
time the wheels leave the ground, the lights have cut out and the valley has been
plunged back into darkness. This is the black world.

According to most members of the black world who are familiar with the
history of Area 51, the base opened its doors in 1955 after two CIA officers,
Richard Bissell and Herbert Miller, chose the place to be the test facility for the
Agency’s first spy plane, the U-2. Part of Area 51’s secret history is that the so-
called Area 51 zone had been in existence for four years by the time the CIA
identified it as a perfect clandestine test facility. Never before disclosed is the
fact that Area 51’s first customer was not the CIA but the Atomic Energy
Commission. Beginning in 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission used its
parallel system of secret-keeping to conduct radical and controversial research,
development, and engineering not just on aircraft but also on pilot-related
projects—entirely without oversight or ethical controls.

That the Atomic Energy Commission was not an agency that
characteristically had any manner of jurisdiction over aircraft and pilot projects
(their business was nuclear bombs and atomic energy) speaks to the shadowy,
shell-game aspect of black-world operations at Area 51. If you move a
clandestine, highly controversial project into a classified agency that does not
logically have anything to do with such a program, the chances of anyone
looking for it there are slim. For more than sixty years, no one has thought of
looking at the Atomic Energy Commission to solve the riddle of Area 51.

In 1955, when the Central Intelligence Agency arrived at Area 51, its men
brought with them the U.S. Air Force as a partner in the nation’s first peacetime
aerial espionage program. Several other key organizations had a vested interest
in the spy plane project and were therefore briefed on Area 51’s existence and
knew that the CIA and Air Force were working in partnership there. Agencies
included NACA—the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA’s
forerunner)—and the Navy, both of which provided cover stories to explain
airplanes flying in and out of a military base that didn’t officially exist. The
National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), the agency that would
interpret the photographs the U-2 collected on spy missions abroad, was also
informed about the area. From 1955 until the late 1980s, these federal agencies
as well as several other clandestine government organizations born in the interim
—including the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the National Security
Agency (NSA), and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)—ah worked
together behind a barrier of secrecy on Area 51 programs. But very few

individuals outside of an elite group of federal employees and black-world
contractors with top secret clearances had confirmation that the secret base really
was there until November of 1989. That is when a soft-spoken, bespectacled,
thirty-year-old native Floridian named Robert Scott Lazar appeared on
Eyewitness News in Las Vegas with an investigative reporter named George
Knapp and revealed Area 51 to the world. Out of the tens of thousands of people
who had worked at Area 51 over the years, Lazar was the only individual who
broke the oath of silence in such a public way. Whether one worked as a scientist
or a security guard, an engineer or an engine cleaner, serving at Area 51 was
both an honor and a privilege. The secrecy oath was sacred, and the veiled
threats of incarceration no doubt helped people keep it. With Bob Lazar, more
than four decades of Area 51’s secrecy came to a dramatic end.

That Bob Lazar wound up at Area 51 owing to a job referral by the
Hungarian-born nuclear physicist Dr, Edward Teller is perfectly ironic. Teller
coinvented the world’s most powerful weapon of mass destruction, the
thermonuclear bomb, and tested many incarnations of his diabolical creation just
a few miles over the hill from Area 51, in the numbered sectors that make up the
Nevada Test Site. The test site is America’s only domestic atomic-bomb range
and is Area 51’s working partner. Area 12, Area 19, and Area 20, inside the test
site’s legal boundaries, are just some of the parcels of land that bear Dr. Teller’s
handprint: charred earth, atomic craters, underground tunnels contaminated with
plutonium.* Area 51 sits just outside.

Bob Lazar first met Edward Teller in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in June of
1982, when Lazar only twenty-three years old. Lazar was working at the Los
Alamos Nuclear Laboratory in radioactive-particle detection as a contractor for
the Kirk-Mayer Corporation when he arrived early for a lecture Teller was
giving in the lab’s auditorium. Before the lecture, Lazar spotted Teller reading
the Los Alamos Monitor, where, as coincidence would have it, there was a page-
1 story featuring Bob Lazar and his new invention, the jet car. Lazar seized the
opportunity. “That’s me you’re reading about,” he famously told Teller as a
means of engaging him in conversation. Here was an ambitious young scientist
reaching out to the jaded, glutted grandfather of mass destruction. In hindsight it
makes perfect sense that the ultimate consequences of this moment were not
beneficent for Lazar.

Six years later, Lazar’s life had reached an unexpected low . He’d been fired
from his job at Los Alamos. Terrible financial problems set in. He and his wife,
Carol Strong, who was thirteen years his senior, moved to Las Vegas and opened

up a photo-processing shop. The marriage fell apart. Lazar remarried a woman
named Tracy Murk , who’d worked as a clerk for the Lazars. Two days after Bob
Lazar’s wedding to Tracy, his first wife, Carol, committed suicide by inhaling
carbon monoxide in a shuttered garage. Lazar declared bankruptcy and sought
advanced engineering work. He reached out to everyone he could think of,
including Dr. Edward Teller, who was now spearheading President Reagan’s
Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars. In 1988, Teller found Lazar a job.

This job was far from any old advanced engineering job. Edward Teller had
recommended Bob Lazar to the most powerful defense-industry contractor at
Area 51, a company called EG&G. Among the thousands of top secret and en¬
deared contractors who have worked on classified and black projects at the
Nevada Test Site and Area 51, none has had as much power and access, or as
little oversight, as EG&G. On Teller’s instruction, Lazar called a telephone
number. A person at the other end of the line told him to go to McCarran Airport,
in downtown Las Vegas, on a specific date in December—to the EG&G building
there. Lazar was told he would be flown by private aircraft to Groom Lake. He
was excited and followed orders. Inside the EG&G building, he was introduced
to a man called Dennis Mariani who would soon become his supervisor. The two
men went to the south end of the airport and into a secure hangar ringed by
security fences and guarded by men with guns. There, EG&G ran a fleet of 737
airplanes that flew back and forth to Groom Lake—and still do. Because they
flew with the call sign Janet, this private Area 51 commuter fleet had become
known as Janet Airlines. Lazar and his supervisor passed through security and
boarded a white aircraft with no markings or logo, just a long red stripe running
the length of the airplane.

Fly to Area 51 on a northerly course from Las Vegas and you’ll see a Nevada
landscape that is classic American Southwest: snowcapped mountains, rolling
hills, and desert valley floors. Bob Lazar would not have seen any of this on his
approach to Groom Lake because the window curtains on his Janet Airlines
flight would have been drawn—they always are when newcomers arrive. The
airspace directly over Area 51 has been restricted since the mid-1950s, which
means no one peers down onto Area 51 without authorization except satellites
circling the globe in outer space. By the time Lazar arrived, the 575-square-mile
airspace had long been nicknamed the Box, and Air Force pilots at nearby Nellis
Air Force Base know never to enter it. Distinctly visible at the very center of
Area 51’s Box sits a near-perfect six-mile-diameter endorheic basin, also known
as a dry lake. It was the lake bed itself that originally appealed to the CIA; for

decades it had doubled as a natural runway for Area 51’s secret spy planes.

Almost everything visible on approach to Area 51 from the air is restricted
government land. There are no public highways, no shopping malls, no
twentieth-century urban sprawl. Where the land is hilly, Joshua trees and yucca
plants grow, their long spiky leaves extended skyward like swords. Where the
land is flat, it is barren and bald. Except for creosote bushes and tumbleweed,
very little grows out here on the desert floor. The physical base—its hangars,
mnways, dormitories, and towers—begins at the southernmost tip of Groom’s
dry lake. The structures spread out in rows, heading south down the Emigrant
Valley floor. The hangars’ metal rooftops catch the sunlight and reflect up as the
Janet airplane enters the Box. A huge antenna tower rises up from the desert
floor. The power plant’s cooling tower comes into view, as do the antennas on
the radio-shop roof, located at the end of one of the two, perpendicular taxi ways.
Radar antennas spin. One dish is sixty feet in diameter and always faces the sky;
its beams are so powerful they would instantly cook the internal organs of any
living thing. The Quick Kill system, designed by Raytheon to detect incoming
missile signals , sits at the edge of the dry lake bed not far from the famous pylon
featured in Lockheed publicity photos but never officially identified as located at
Area 51. Insiders call the pylon “the pole”—it’s where the radar cross section on
prototype stealth aircraft is measured. State-of-the-art, million-dollar black
aircraft are turned upside down and hoisted aloft on this pole, making each one
look tiny and insignificant in the massive Groom Lake expanse, like a bug on a
pin in a viewing case.

As a passenger on the Janet 737 gets closer, it becomes easier for the eye to
judge distance. Groom Mountain reveals itself as a massive summit that reaches
9,348 feet. It towers over the base at its northernmost end and is rife with Area
51 history and lore. Countless Area 51 commanding officers have spent
weekends on the mountain hunting deer. Hidden inside its craggy lower peaks
are two old lead and silver mines named Black Metal and Sheehan Mine. In the
1950s, one ancient miner hung on to his federal mining rights with such ferocity
that the government ended up giving him a security clearance and briefing him
on Area 51 activities rather than continuing to fight to remove him. The miner
kept the secrecy oath and took Area 51’s early secrets with him to the grave.

At the southernmost end of the base sits a gravel pit and concrete-mixing
facilities that are used to construct temporary buildings that need to go up quick.
Against the sloping hills to the west sit the old fuel-storage tanks that once
housed JP-7 jet fuel, specially designed for CIA spy planes that needed to

withstand temperature fluctuations from -90 degrees to 285 degrees Fahrenheit.
To the south, on a plateau of its own, is the weapons assembly and storage
facility. This is recognizable from the air by a tall ring of mounded dirt meant to
deflect blasts in the event of an accident. Behind the weapons depot, a single¬
lane dirt road runs up over the top of the hill and dumps back down into the
Nevada Test Site next door, at Gate 800 (sometimes called Gate 700). Old-timers
from the U-2 spy plane days called this access point Gate 385 . originally the
only way in to Area 51 if you were not arriving by air. On the Area 51 side of the
gate, the shipping and receiving building can be found. In the height of the
nuclear testing days, the 1950s and 1960s, trucks from the Atomic Energy
Commission motor pool spent hours in the parking lot here while their
appropriately cleared drivers enjoyed Area 51’s legendary gourmet chow.

In December of 1988, had Lazar been looking out the Janet 737 aircraft
window just before landing, off to the northwest he would have seen EG&G
radar sites dotting the valley floor in a diagonal line. Part of the Air Force’s
foreign technology division, which began in 1968, these radar sites include
coveted Soviet radar systems acquired from Eastern-bloc countries and captured
during Middle East wars. Also to the north lies Slater Lake, named after
Commander Slater and dug by contractors during the Vietnam War. Around the
lake’s sloped banks are trees unusual for the area: tall and leafy, looking as if
they belong in Europe or on the East Coast. This is the only nonindigenous plant
life in all of Area 51. Move ahead to December of 1998, and five miles beyond
Slater Lake, across the flat, dry valley floor, an airplane passenger would have
seen a crew of men dressed in HAZMAT suits busily removing the top six inches
of soil from a 269-acre parcel contaminated with plutonium. Set inside Area 51’s
airspace but in a quadrant of its own, this sector was designated Area 13. What
the men did was known to only a select few. Like all things at Area 51, if a
person didn’t have a need-to-know, he knew not to ask.

The airplane carrying Lazar would likely have landed on the easternmost
runway and then taxied up to the Janet terminal, near the security building. Lazar
and his supervisor, Dennis Mariani, would have gone through security there .
According to Lazar, he was taken to a cafeteria on the base. When a bus pulled
up, he and Mariani climbed aboard. Lazar said he could not see exactly where he
was taken because the curtains on the bus windows were drawn. If Lazar had
been able to look outside he would have seen the green grass of the Area 51
baseball field, where, beginning in the mid-1960s, during the bonanza of
underground nuclear testing, Area 51 workers battled Nevada Test Site workers

at weekly softball games. Lazar’s bus would have also driven past the outdoor
tennis courts, where Dr. Albert Wheelon, the former Mayor of Area 51, loved to
play tennis matches at midnight. Lazar would have passed the swimming pool
where CIA project pilots trained for ocean bailouts by jumping into the pool
wearing their high-altitude flight suits. Lazar would have passed the Area 51 bar,
called Sam’s Place , built by and named after the great Area 51 navigator Sam
Pizzo and in which a photograph of a nearly naked Sophia Loren used to drive
men wild.

In December of 1988, Lazar had no idea that he was stepping into a deep,
textured, and totally secret history. He couldn’t have known it because the men
described above wouldn’t tell their stories for another twenty years, not until
their CIA project was declassified and they spoke on the record for this book.

But Lazar’s arrival at Area 51 made its own kind of history, albeit in a radical
and controversial way. In making Area 51 public, as he subsequently did, Lazar
transformed the place from a clandestine research, development, and test-flight
facility into a national enigma. From the moment Lazar appeared on Eyewitness
News in Las Vegas making utterly shocking allegations, the public’s fascination
with Area 51, already percolating for decades, took on a life of its own. Movies,
television shows, record albums, and video games would spring forth, all paying
homage to a secret base that no outsider could ever visit.

According to Lazar , that first day he was at Area 51 he was driven on a
bumpy dirt road for approximately twenty or thirty minutes before arriving at a
mysterious complex of hangars built into the side of a mountain somewhere on
the outskirts of Groom Lake. There, at an outpost facility Lazar says was called
S-4, he was processed through a security system far more intense than the one
he’d been subjected to just a little earlier, at Area 51’s primary base. He signed
one document allowing his home telephone to be monitored and another that
waived his constitutional rights. Then he was shown a flying saucer and told it
would be his job to reverse engineer its anti gravity propulsion system. All told,
there were nine saucers at S-4, Lazar says. He says he was given a manual that
explained that the flying saucers had come from another planet. Lazar also said
he was shown drawings of beings that looked like aliens—the pilots, he inferred,
of these outer-space crafts.

According to Lazar, over the following winter, he worked at S-4, mostly
during the night, for a total of approximately ten days. The work was intense but
sporadic, which frustrated him. Sometimes he worked only one night a week. He
longed for more. He never told anyone about what he was doing at S-4, not even

his wife, Tracy, or his best friend, Gene Huff. One night in early March of 1989,
Lazar was being escorted down a hallway inside S-4 by two armed guards when
he was ordered to keep his eyes forward. Instead, curiosity seized Bob Lazar. He
glanced sideways, through a small, nine-bv-nine-inch window , and for a brief
moment, he says, he saw inside an unmarked room. He thought he saw a small,
gray alien with a large head standing between two men dressed in white coats.
When he tried to get a better look, he was pushed by a guard who told him to
keep his eyes forward and down.

For Lazar, it was a turning point. Something shifted in him and he felt he
could no longer bear the secret of the flying saucers or what was maybe an alien
but “could have been a million things.” Like the tragic literary figure Faust,
Lazar had yearned for secret knowledge, information that other men did not
possess. He got that at S-4. But unlike Faust, Bob Lazar did not hold up his end
of the bargain. Instead, Lazar felt compelled to share what he had learned with
his wife and his friend, meaning he broke his Area 51 secrecy oath. Lazar knew
the schedule for the flying saucer test flights being conducted out at Groom Lake
and he suggested to his wife, Tracy, his friend Gene Huff, and another friend
named John Lear—a committed ufologist and the son of the man who invented
the Learjet—that they come along with him and see for themselves.

The group made a trip down Highway 375 into the mountains behind Groom
Lake. With them they brought high-powered binoculars and a video camera.
They waited. Sure enough, they said, the activity began. Lazar’s wife and friends
saw what appeared to be a brightly lit saucer rise up from above the mountains
that hid the Area 51 base from view. They watched it hover and land. The
following Wednesday they returned to the site. Then they made a third visit, on
April 5, 1989—this time down a long road leading into the base called Groom
Lake Road—which ended in fiasco. The trespassers were discovered by Area 51
security guards, detained, and required to show ID. They answered questions for
the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department and were let go.

The following day, Lazar reported to work at the EG&G building at
McCarran Airport. He was met by Dennis Mariani, who informed Lazar that he
would not be going out to Groom Lake as planned. Instead, Lazar was driven to
Indian Springs Air Force Base. The guard who had caught him the night before
was helicoptered in from the Area 51 perimeter to confirm that Bob Lazar was
one of the four people found snooping in the woods the night before. Lazar was
told that he was no longer an employee of EG&G and if he ever went anywhere
near Groom Lake again, alone or with friends, he would be arrested for

espionage.

During his questioning at Indian Springs, he was allegedly given transcripts
of his wife’s telephone conversations , which made clear to Lazar that his wife
was having an affair. Lazar became convinced he was being followed by
government agents. Someone shot out his tire when he was driving to the airport,
he said. Fearing for his life, he decided to go public with his story and contacted
Eyewitness News anchor George Knapp. Lazar’s TV appearance in November of
1989 broke the station’s record for viewers, but the original audience was limited
to locals. It took some months for Lazar’s story to go global. The man
responsible for that happening was a Japanese American mortician living in Los
Angeles named Norio Havakawa .

Decades later, Norio Hayakawa still recalls the moment he first heard Lazar
on the radio. “It was late at night,” Hayakawa explains. “I was working in the
mortuary and listening to talk radio. KVEG out of Las Vegas, ‘The Happening
Show,’ with host Billy Goodman. Remember, this was in early 1990, long before
Art Bell and George Noory were doing ‘Coast to Coast,”’ Hayakawa recalls. “I
heard Bob Lazar telling his story about S-Four and I became intrigued.” As
Hayakawa toiled away at the Fukui Mortuary in Little Tokyo, he listened to Bob
Lazar talk about flying saucers. Having no television experience, Hayakawa
contacted a Japanese magazine called Mu, renowned for its popular stories about
UFOs. “Mu got in touch with me right away and said they were interested. And
that Nippon TV was interested too.” In a matter of weeks, Japan’s leading TV
station had dispatched an eight-man crew from Tokyo to Los Angeles.

Hayakawa took them out to Las Vegas, where he’d arranged for an interview
with Bob Lazar. That was in February of 1990.

“We went on a Wednesday because that was the day we’d heard on the radio
they did flying saucer tests,” Hayakawa recalls. “We interviewed Lazar for three
or four hours. He was a strange person. He had bodyguards with him in his
house who followed him around everywhere he went. But we were satisfied with
the interview. We decided to try and film some of the saucer activity at Area 51.”
Hayakawa asked Lazar if he would take them to the lookout point on Tikaboo
Mountain off Highway 375. Lazar declined but told them exactly where to go
and at what time. “We went to the place and set up our equipment. Lo and
behold, just after sundown, a bright orangeish light came rising up off the land
near Groom Lake. We were filming. It came up and made a fast directional
change. This happened three times. We couldn’t believe it,” Hayakawa says. At
the time, he was convinced that what he saw was a flying saucer—just like Lazar

had said.

Hayakawa showed the footage to the magazine’s bosses in Japan, who were
thrilled. The TV station had paid Lazar a little over five thousand dollars for a
two-hour segment about his experience at Area 51. Part of the deal was that
Lazar was going to fly to Tokyo with Norio Hayakawa to do a fifteen-minute
interview there. Instead, just a few days before the show, Lazar called the
director of Nippon TV and said federal agents were preventing him from leaving
the country. Lazar agreed to appear on the show via telephone and answered
questions from telephone callers instead. “The program aired in Japan’s golden
hour,” Hayakawa says, “prime time.” Thirty million Japanese viewers tuned in.
“The program introduced Japan to Area 51.”

As Lazar’s Area 51 story became known around the world, Bob Lazar the
person was scrutinized by a voracious press. Every detail of his flawed
background was aired as dirty laundry for the public to dissect. It appeared he’d
lied about where he went to school. Lazar said he had a degree from MIT, but
the university says it had no record of him. In Las Vegas, Lazar was arrested on a
pandering charge. It didn’t take long for him to disappear from the public eye.
But Bob Lazar never changed his story about what he saw at Area 51’s S-4. Had
Lazar witnessed evidence of aliens and alien technology? Was his discrediting
part of a government plot to silence him? Or was he a fabricator, a loose cannon
who perceived what he saw as an opportunity for money and fame? He sold the
film rights to his story, to New Line Cinema, in 1993. Lazar took two lie detector
tests , and both gave inconclusive results. The person administrating the test said
it appeared that Lazar believed what he was saying was true.

“The odd part,” says Norio Hayakawa, “is how in the years after Lazar, the
story of Area 51 merged with the story of Roswell. If you stop anyone on the
street and you ask them what they know about Area 51 they say aliens.”

Or they say Roswell.

To the tens of millions of Americans who believe UFOs come from other
planets, Roswell is the holy grail. But Roswell has not always been considered
the pinnacle of UFO events. It too had a hidden history for many years.

“What you need to remember is that in 1978, the Roswell crash registered a
point-zero-one on the scale in terms of important UFO crashes,” explains
Stanton Friedman , a septuagenarian nuclear-physicist-turned-ufologist often
referred to by Larry King and others as America’s leading expert on UFOs.

“Until the 1980s, the most important book about UFOs was called Flying
Saucers—Serious Business, written by newsman Frank Edwards,” Friedman
says. “In the book, thousands of UFO sightings are discussed and yet Roswell is
mentioned for maybe half a paragraph. That is not very much compared to now.”

Until Stanton Friedman’s expose on the Roswell incident , which he began in
1978, the story was limited to a few publicly known facts. During the first week
of July 1947, in the middle of a powerful lightning storm, something crashed
onto a rancher’s property outside Roswell, New Mexico. The rancher, named W.
W. Brazel, had been a famous cowboy in his earlier days. Brazel loaded the
strange pieces of debris that had come down from the sky into his pickup truck
and drove them to the local sheriff’s office in Roswell. From there, Sheriff
George Wilcox reported Brazel’s findings to the Roswell Army Air Field down
the road. The commander of the 509th Bomb Group at the base assigned two
individuals to the W. W. Brazel case: an intelligence officer named Major Jesse
Marcel and a press officer named Walter Haut.

Later that same day, Frank Joyce, a young stringer for United Press
International and a radio announcer at KGFL in Roswell, received a telephone
call from the Roswell Army Air Field. It was press officer Walter Haut saying
that he was bringing over a very important press release to be read on the air.
Haut arrived at KGFL and handed Frank Joyce the original Roswell statement,
which was printed in the paper later that afternoon, July 8, 1947, and in the San
Francisco Chronicle the following day.

The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday
when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air
Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession
of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the
Sheriff’s Office of Chaves County.

The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week.
Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as
he was able to contact the Sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major
Jesse A. Marcel, of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office.

Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the
rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and
subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.

Three hours after Haut dropped off the statement, the commander of the Roswell
Army Air Field sent Walter Haut back to KGFL with a second press release
stating that the first press release had been incorrect. What had crashed on W. W.
Brazel’s ranch outside Roswell was nothing more than a weather balloon.
Photographs showing intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel posing with the
weather balloon were offered as proof. The story faded. No one in the town of
Roswell, New Mexico, spoke of it publicly for more than thirty years. Then, in
1978, Stan Friedman and his UFO research partner, a man named Bill Moore,
showed up in Roswell and began asking questions. “Bill and I went after the
story the hard way,” says Friedman. “There was no Internet back then. We went
to libraries, dug through telephone records, made call after call.” After two years
of research, Friedman and Moore had interviewed more than sixty-two original
witnesses to the Roswell incident. Those interviewed included intelligence
officer Major Jesse Marcel and press officer Walter Haut.

It turned out that a lot more had happened in Roswell, New Mexico, in the
first and second weeks of July 1947 than just a weather-balloon crash. For
starters, large numbers of the military had descended upon the town. W. W.
Brazel was jailed for almost a week. Some witnesses saw military police loading
large boxes and crates onto military trucks. Other witnesses saw large boxes
being loaded onto military aircraft. The local coroner received a mysterious call
requesting several child-size coffins that could be hermetically sealed.

Townsfolk were threatened with federal prison time if they spoke about what
they saw. The majority of the stories relayed by the sixty-two witnesses to UFO
researchers Friedman and Moore all had two factors in common. The first was
that the crash, which included more than one crash site, involved a flying saucer,
or round disc. The second assertion was jaw-dropping. Witnesses said they saw
bodies. Not just any old bodies but child-size, humanoid-type beings that had
apparently been inside the flying saucer. These aviators had big heads, large oval
eyes, and no noses. The conclusion that the majority of the witnesses drew for
the UFO researchers was that these child-size aviators were not from this world.

In 1980, a book based on Friedman and Moore’s research was published . It
was called The Roswell Incident The lid was off Roswell, and the floodgates
opened. “By 1986 a total of ninety-two people had come forward with
eyewitness accounts of what really had happened back in 1947,” Friedman
asserts. Ufologists elevated the Roswell incident to sacred status; that is how it
became the holy grail of UFOs.

When Bob Lazar went public with his story about flying saucers and a small,

alien-looking being at S-4, just outside the base at Area 51, it would seem to
follow that Stanton Friedman and his colleagues would champion Bob Lazar’s
story. Instead, the opposite happened. “Bob Lazar is a total fraud,” Friedman
contends. “He has no credibility as a scientist. He said he went to MIT. He did
not. He called himself a nuclear physicist and he is not. I resent that. I got in to
MIT and could not afford to go there. You can’t make something like that up and
expect to be taken seriously.” Friedman says he does not care what Lazar says he
saw. He can’t get past the false statements Lazar made about himself. It was not
like Friedman didn’t try to have a face-to-face with Lazar. “I spoke with Lazar
on the telephone in 1990. We arranged to have lunch [in Nevada] but he never
showed up,” Friedman explains. “Scientists normally have diplomas. They write
papers, they appear in directories. I wanted to ask him why none of that applies
to Bob Lazar. I tried to believe him. I was not antithetic to his story. He’s
obviously a very smart guy and not just because he could put a jet engine on the
back of a car. But my conclusion about him is that he’s a total fraud.”

It is unfortunate the two men never had lunch. In talking, they might have
realized how close to the truth—something far more earthly and shocking than
anyone could have imagined—they both were. The true and uncensored story of
Area 51 spans more than seven decades. The Roswell crash is but a thread, and
Area 51 itself—the secret spot in the desert—has its origins in places and events
far outside the fifty square miles of restricted airspace now known as the Box.

It all began in 1938, with an imaginary war of the worlds.

CHAPTER TWO

Imagine a War of the Worlds

On Halloween eve in 1938, mass hysteria descended upon New Jersey as CBS
Radio broadcast a narrative adaptation of Victorian-era science fiction novel The
War of the Worlds. Listening to the live radio play, many people became
convinced that Martians were attacking Earth , in New Jersey, and killing huge
numbers of Americans. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the show’s narrator began, “we
interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin.” A huge,
flaming meteorite had crashed into farmland at Grover’s Mill, twenty-two miles
north of Trenton, listeners were told.

Frank Readick, playing Carl Phillips, a CBS reporter claiming to be
physically on scene, delivered a breaking report: “The object doesn’t look very
much like a meteor,” Phillips said, his voice shaky. “It looks more like a huge
cylinder. The metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial!” Things quickly moved
from harmless to malevolent and Phillips began to scream: “Ladies and
gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed! Someone’s
crawling out of the hollow top!” Phillips explained that extraterrestrial beings
had begun wriggling their way out of the crashed craft, revealing bodies as large
as bears’ but with snakelike tentacles instead of limbs. The woods were ablaze,
Phillips screamed. Barns were burning down, and the gas tanks of parked
automobiles had been targeted to explode. Radio listeners heard wailing and then
silence, indicating the newsman was now dead. Next, a man solemnly identified
himself as the secretary of the interior and interrupted the report. “Citizens of the
nation,” he declared, “I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation that
confronts the country.” Scores were dead, including members of the New Jersey
police force. The U.S. Army had been mobilized. New York City was under

evacuation orders. Interplanetary warfare had begun.

Although the 8:00 p.m. broadcast had opened with a brief announcement that
the story was science fiction and based on the novel by H. G. Wells, huge
numbers of people across America believed it was real. Those who turned their
radio dials for confirmation learned that other radio stations had interrupted their
own broadcasts to follow the exclusive, live CBS Radio coverage about the Mars
attack. Thousands called the station and thousands more called the police.
Switchboards jammed . Hospitals began admitting people for hysteria and shock.
Families in New Jersey rushed out of their homes to inform anyone not in the
know that the world was experiencing a Martian attack. The state police sent a
Teletype over their communications system noting the broadcast drama was “an
imaginary affair,” but the hysteria was already well beyond local law
enforcement’s control. Across New York and New Jersey, people loaded up their
cars and fled. To many, it was the beginning of the end of the world.

The following morning, the New York Times carried a page-1, above-the-fold
story headlined “Radio Listeners in a Panic Taking War Drama as Fact.” Across
the nation, there had been reports of “disrupted households, interrupted religious
services, traffic jams and clogged communications systems.” All through the
night, in churches from Harlem to San Diego, people prayed for salvation. In the
month that followed, more than 12,500 news stories discussed the War of the
Worlds broadcast. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened an
investigation but in the end decided not to penalize CBS, largely on the grounds
of freedom of speech. It was not the FCC’s role to “censor what shall or shall not
be said over the radio,” Commissioner T. A. M. Craven said. “The public does
not want a spineless radio.”

The 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast tapped into the nation’s growing fears.
Just two weeks before, Adolf Hitler’s troops had invaded Czechoslovakia,
leaving the security of Europe unclear. Rapid advances in science and
technology, which included radar, jet engines, and microwaves, left many
Depression-era Americans overwhelmed by how science might affect a coming
war. Death rays and murderous Martians may have been pure science fiction in
1938 but the concepts played on people’s fears of invasion and annihilation. Man
has always been afraid of the sneak attack, which is exactly what Hitler had just
done in Czechoslovakia and what Japan would soon accomplish at Pearl Harbor.
The weapons introduced in World War II included rockets, drones, and the
atomic bombs—were all foreshadowed in Wells’s story. Advances in science
were about to fundamentally change the face of war and make science fiction not

as fictional as it had once been. World War II would leave fifty million dead.

From the moment it hit the airwaves, the War of the Worlds radio broadcast
had a profound effect on the American military. The following month, a handful
of “military listeners” relayed their sanitized thoughts on the subject to reporters
with the Associated Press. “What struck the military listeners most about the
radio play was its immediate emotional effect,” the officials told the AP.
“Thousands of persons believed a real invasion had been unleashed. They
exhibited all the symptoms of fear, panic, determination to resist, desperation,
bravery, excitement or fatalism that real war would have produced,” which in
turn “shows the government will have to insist on the close co-operation of radio
in any future war.” What these military men were not saying was that there was
serious concern among strategists and policy makers that entire segments of the
population could be so easily manipulated into thinking that something false was
something true. Americans had taken very real, physical actions based on
something entirely made up. Pandemonium had ensued. Totalitarian nations
were able to manipulate their citizens like this, but in America? This kind of
mass control had never been seen so clearly and definitively before.

America was not the only place where government officials were impressed
by how easily people could be influenced by a radio broadcast. Adolf Hitler took
note as well . He referred to the Americans’ hysterical reaction to the War of the
Worlds broadcast in a Berlin speech, calling it “evidence of the decadence and
corrupt condition of democracy.” It was later revealed that in the Soviet Union,
Joseph Stalin had also been paying attention. And President Roosevelt’s top
science adviser, Vannevar Bush, observed the effects of the fictional radio
broadcast with a discerning eye. The public’s tendency to panic alarmed him, he
would later tell W. Cameron Forbes, his colleague at the Carnegie Institution.
Three months later, alarming news again hit the airwaves, but this time it was
pure science, not science fiction.

On January 26, 1939, the Carnegie Institution sponsored a press conference
to announce the discovery of nuclear fission to the world. When the declaration
was made that two German-born scientists had succeeded in splitting the atom, a
number of physicists who were present literally ran from the room. The
realization was as profound as it was devastating. If scientists could split one
atom then surely they would be able to create a chain reaction of splitting atoms
—the result of which would be an enormous release of energy. Three months
later, the New York Times reported that scientists at a follow-up conference were
heard arguing “over the probability of some scientist blowing up a sizable

portion of the Earth with a tiny bit of uranium.” This was the terrifying prospect
now facing the world. “Science Discovers Real Frankenstein” headlined an
article in the Boston Herald that went on to explain that now “an unscrupulous
dictator, lusting for conquest, [could] wipe Boston, Worcester and Providence
out of existence.” Vannevar Bush disagreed with the popular press. The “real
danger” in the discovery of fission, he told Forbes, was not atomic energy itself
but the public’s tendency to panic over things they did not understand. To make
his point, Bush used the War of the Worlds radio broadcast as an example .

Atomic energy, it turned out, was far more powerful than anything previously
made by man. Six years and seven months after the announcement of the
discovery of fission, America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, essentially wiping out both of those cities and a quarter of a million
people living there. President Roosevelt had appointed Vannevar Bush to lead
the group that made the bomb. Bush was the director of the Manhattan Project,
the nation’s first true black operation, and he ran it with totalitarian-like control.

When the Japanese Empire surrendered, Vannevar Bush did not rejoice so
much as ponder his next move . For eighteen days he watched as Joseph Stalin
marched Soviet troops into eastern Asia, positioning his Red Army forces in
China, Manchuria, Sakhalin Island, and North Korea. When the fighting finally
stopped, Bush’s response had become clear. He would convince President
Truman that the Soviet Union could not be trusted. In facing down America’s
new enemy, the nation needed even more advanced technologies to fight future
wars. The most recent war might have ended, but science needed to stay on the
forward march.

As Americans celebrated peace (after the atomic bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, public opinion polls showed that more than 85 percent
of Americans approved of the bombings), Vannevar Bush and members of the
War Department began planning to use the atomic bomb again in a live test—a
kind of mock nuclear naval battle, which they hoped could take place the
following summer in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. There, in a deep lagoon
at Bikini Atoll, dozens of captured Japanese and German warships would be
blown up using live nuclear bombs. The operation would illustrate to the world
just how formidable America’s new weapons were. It would be called Operation
Crossroads. As its name implied, the event marked a critical juncture. America
was signaling to Russia it was ready to do battle with nuclear bombs.

In less than a year, Operation Crossroads was in full swing on Bikini Atoll, a
twenty-five-mile ring of red coral islands encircling a clear, blue lagoon. A July
1946 memo, one of many marked Secret, instructed the men not to swim in the
lagoon wearing red bathing trunks. There were barracuda everywhere . Word was
that the fanged-tooth fish would attack swimmers without warning.

The natives of Bikini, all 167 of them, were led by a king named Juda . but in
July of 1946, none of them were on Bikini Atoll anymore. The U.S, Navy had
evacuated the natives to Rongerik Atoll . 125 miles to the east. The upcoming
three-bomb atomic test series would make their homeland unsafe for a while, the
natives were told. But it was going to help ensure world peace.

On the shores of the atoll, a young man named Alfred O’Donnell lay in his
Quonset hut listening to the wind blow and the rain pound against the reinforced
sheet-metal roof above him. He was unable to sleep. “The reason was because I
had too much to worry about,” O’Donnell explains, remembering Crossroads
after more than sixty years. “Is everything all right? Is the bomb going to go off,
like planned?” What the twenty-four-year-old weapons engineer was worrying
about were the sea creatures in the lagoon. “Let’s say an octopus came into
contact with one of the bomb’s wires. What would happen? What if something
got knocked out of place?” The wires O’Donnell referred to ran from a concrete
bunker on Bikini called the control point and out into the ocean, where they
connected to a twenty-three-kiloton atomic bomb code-named Baker. The men
in the U.S. Navy’s Task Force One gave the bomb a more colorful name: they
called it Helen of Bikini, after the legendary femme fatale for whom so many
ancient warriors laid down their lives. A nuclear weapon was both destructive
and seductive, the sailors said, just like Helen of Troy had been.

As a leading member of the arming party that would wire and fire the atomic
bombs during Operation Crossroads, O’Donnell had a tremendous responsibility,
especially for someone so young. “Five years earlier I was just a kid from
Boston with a normal life. All I was thinking about for my future was a baseball
career,” O’Donnell recalls. In 1941, when O’Donnell was in high school, he’d
been recruited by the Boston Braves, thanks to his exceptional .423 batting
average. Then came the war, and everything changed. He married Ruth. He
joined the Navy, where he learned radio and electronics. In both subjects he
quickly excelled. Back in Boston after the war, O’Donnell was mysteriously
recruited for a job with Raytheon Production Corporation, a defense contract
company cofounded by Vannevar Bush. What exactly the job entailed,

O’Donnell did not know when he signed on. The recruiters told him he would

find out more details once he was granted a security clearance. “I didn’t know
what a security clearance was back then,” O’Donnell recalls. After a month, he
learned that he was now part of the Manhattan Project. He was transferred to a
small engineering company named for the three MIT professors who ran it:
Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier. Later, the company shortened its name to
EG&G. There, O’Donnell was trained to wire a nuclear bomb by Herbert Grier,
the man who had invented the firing systems for the bombs dropped on Japan.

“The next thing I knew I was asked to go to Bikini in the summer of 1946,”
says O’Donnell. “I did not want to go. I’d fought on those atolls during the war.
I’d seen bodies of young soldiers floating dead in the water and I swore I’d
never go back. But Ruth and I had a baby on the way and she said go, and I did.”
He went on, “I missed Ruth. She was pregnant, thank God, but I wondered what
she was doing back in Boston where we lived. Was she able to take out the
garbage all right?” Forty-two thousand people had gathered on Bikini Atoll to
witness Operation Crossroads, and O’Donnell could not sleep because he felt all
of those eyes were on him. Thinking about Ruth was how O’Donnell stopped
worrying about how well he had wired the bomb.

Elsewhere on Bikini Atoll, Colonel Richard Sully Leghorn cut the figure of a
war hero. Handsome and mustached, Leghorn looked just like Clark Gable in It
Happened One Night. Commanding officer of Task Force 1.5.2, Leghorn was
one of the pilots leading the mission to photograph the nuclear bombs from the
air. Leghorn spent afternoons with Navy navigators rehearsing flight paths that,
come shot day, would take him within viewing distance of the atomic cloud. At
twenty-seven years old, Richard Leghorn was already a public figure. He’d been
the young reconnaissance officer who’d taken photographs of the beaches of
Normandy on D-day. “ In the face of intense fire from some of the strongest anti¬
aircraft installments in western Europe, Richard Leghorn photographed bridges,
rail junctions, airfields and other targets,” the U.S. Army Air Forces was proud
to say. Leghorn, a physicist, had a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. He loved the scientific concept of photography, which was why he
went to work for Eastman Kodak after the war. Then, in early 1946, the Navy
called him back for temporary duty on Operation Crossroads. He trained at the
Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico and flew the military’s best
photographic equipment across the Pacific. Now here he was on Bikini. Soon,
Leghorn would be soaring over the mushroom cloud taking pictures of what

happens to warships when they are targeted by a nuclear bomb.

At central command, Curtis Emerson LeMay stood chomping on a cigar. LeMay
was going over procedures and protocols for the Crossroads event. Just thirty-
nine years old, LeMay had already graced the cover of Time magazine and was
known around the world as the man who’d helped end World War II. By the time
he was forty-five, Curtis LeMay would become the youngest four-star general in
the U.S. military since Ulysses S. Grant. Dark, brooding, and of legendary self-
will, LeMay had led the incendiary bombing campaigns against Japanese cities,
including Tokyo. When the napalm bombs didn’t end war in the Pacific,
President Truman authorized LeMay to lead the 509th Operations Group, based
on Tinian Island, to drop the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.

Curtis LeMay rarely smiled . When he spoke, it was described as “not much
more than a snarl.” Critics called him a coldhearted military strategist and
attributed his calculated vision to a troubled upbringing. His father was a violent
drunk, and LeMay was forced to help support the family when he was a child. At
the age of seven, he was shooting sparrows for an old-lady neighbor who paid
five cents per bird . Though journalist I. P. Stone called LeMay a “Caveman in a
Jet Bomber.” his men adored him, often noting that he was not someone who
sent his men into battle but one who led them there. During the war in the
Pacific, LeMay often flew lead on bombing raids. But now the war was over and
LeMay was thinking about a military strategy for the future. Beginning at
Crossroads, he would shape the U.S. Air Lorce in a way no other individual has
since. As deputy chief of air staff for research and development of the U.S.

Army Air Lorces, LeMay was at Bikini to determine how effective the bomb
could be in nuclear naval battles against the Soviet Union.

Operation Crossroads was a huge event , described as “the apocalypse with
fireworks.” To someone who didn’t know World War II was over, the scene on
the lagoon at Bikini that day might have seemed surreal. An armada of captured
German and Japanese warships had been lined up alongside retired American
cruisers and destroyers. These were massive, football-field-size warships whose
individual might was dwarfed only by the combined power of them all. Eight
submarines had been tethered to anchors on the ocean floor. There were over one
million tons of battle-wearv steel floating on the ocean without a single human
on board. Instead, thousands of pigs, sheep, and rats had been set out in the

South Pacific sunshine, in cages or in leg irons, and they would face the coming
atomic blast. Some of the animals had metal tags around their necks; others had
Geiger counters clipped to their ears. The Navy wanted to determine how living
things fared against nuclear bombs.

Forty miles west of the lagoon, Alfred O’Donnell stood below deck in the
control room of an observation ship watching the control bay. Above him, on
deck, Los Alamos scientists, generals, admirals, and dignitaries waited in great
anticipation for the bomb. Shielding their eyes were dark, 4.5-density goggles,
necessary measures to prevent anyone from being blinded by the nuclear flash.
O’Donnell worked the instrument panel in front of him. There were sixty
seconds to go. He watched the auto sequence timer perform its function. With
less than a minute remaining, the firing system moved into automation. The bars
on the oscilloscopes moved from left to right as the signals passed down through
the DN-11 relay system . There were ten seconds left. Then five seconds. The
light for the arming signal blinked on. Two seconds. The firing signal flashed.

It was zero time.

O’Donnell kept his eyes on the control panel down to the last second, as was
his job. In the event of a malfunction, it would be up to him to let the
commander know. But the signal had been sent without a problem, and now it
was moving down the underwater wires, racing toward the Baker bomb. If
O’Donnell moved fast, he could make it onto the ship’s deck in time to see the
nuclear blast. Racing out of the control room, he pulled his goggles over his
eyes. Up on the ship’s deck he took a deep breath of sea air. There was nothing
to see. The world in front of him was pitch-black viewed through the goggles.

He stared into the blackness; it was quiet and still. He could have heard a pin
drop. He listened to people breathing in the silence. Facing the lagoon,
O’Donnell let go of the ship’s railing and walked out farther on the deck. He
knew the distance from the button to the bomb and the time it took for the signal
to get there. In a matter of seconds, the signal would reach its destination.

There was a blinding flash and things were not black anymore. Then there
was a white-orange light that seemed brighter than the sun as the world in front
of O’Donnell transformed again, this time to a fiery red. He watched a massive,
megaton column of water rise up out of the lagoon. The mushroom cloud began
to form. “Monstrous! Terrifying! It kept getting bigger and bigger,” O’Donnell
recalls. “It was huge. The cloud. The mushroom cap. Like watching huge petals
unfold on a giant flower. Up and out, the petals curled around and came back
down under the bottom of the cap of the mushroom cloud.” Next came the wind.

O’Donnell says, “I watched the column as it started to bend. My eyes went back
to the top of the mushroom cloud where ice was starting to form. The ice fell off
and started to float down. Then it all disappeared into the fireball. Watching your
first nuclear bomb go off is not something you ever forget.”

Mesmerized by the Baker bomb’s power, O’Donnell stood staring out over
the sea from the ship’s deck. He was so overwhelmed by what he’d witnessed,
he forgot all about the shock blast that would come his way next. The wave of a
nuclear bomb travels at approximately one hundred miles per hour, which means
it would reach the ship four minutes after the initial blast. “I forgot to hold on to
the rail,” O’Donnell explains. “When the shock wave came it picked me up and
threw me ten feet back against the bulkhead.” Lying on the ship’s deck, his body
badly bruised, O’Donnell thought to himself: You damn fool! You had been
forewarned.

High above the lagoon, Colonel Richard Leghorn piloted his airplane through
the bright blue sky. To the south, in the distance, cumulus clouds formed. The
U.S. Army Air Forces navigators had sent Leghorn close enough to ground zero
to assess what had happened down below on the lagoon, but far enough away so
as not to be irradiated by the mushroom cloud. What Leghorn witnessed
horrified him . He watched Baker’s underwater fireball produce a hollow column,
or chimney, of radioactive water six thousand feet tall, two thousand feet wide,
and with walls three hundred feet thick. The warships below were tossed up into
the air like bathtub toys. The Japanese battleship Nagato, formerly the flagship
of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man responsible for planning the attack on
Pearl Harbor, was thrown four hundred yards. The retired USS Arkansas, all
twenty-seven thousand tons of it, was upended against the water column on its
nose. Eight mighty battleships disappeared in the nuclear inferno. Had the
armada floating in the lagoon been crewed to capacity, thirty-five thousand
sailors would have been vaporized.

From up in the air Colonel Leghorn considered what he was witnessing in the
exact moment that the bomb went off. It was not as if Leghorn were a stranger to
the violence of war. He had flown more than eighty reconnaissance missions
over enemy-controlled territory in Europe, from 1943 to 1945. On D-day, at
Normandy, Leghorn made three individual passes over the beachheads in a
single-seat airplane without any guns. But like O’Donnell, Leghorn was able to
recollect Operation Crossroads with precise detail after more than sixty years.

For Colonel Leghorn, this is because he remembered exactly how it made him
feel. “I knew in that life-defining moment the world could not ever afford to
have a nuclear war,” Leghorn says. The only sane path to military superiority in
an atomic age was to spy on the enemy so that you always had more information
about the enemy than the enemy had about you. Leghorn says, “That was the
way to prevent war and that is how I formulated the original idea of overhead.”

At the time, in 1946, America’s intelligence services had virtually no idea
about what was going on in Russia west of the Volga River and absolutely no
idea what was happening west of the Ural Mountains. Leghorn believed that if
the United States could fly secret reconnaissance missions over Russia’s
enormous landmass and photograph its military installations, the nation could
stay ahead of the Russians. By spying on the enemy, America could learn what
atomic capabilities the Russians had, what plutonium- or uranium-processing
facilities existed, what shipyards or missile-launch facilities the Soviets were
constructing. And because Leghorn was a scientist, he could imagine precisely
the way the military could accomplish this. His idea was to create a state-of-the-
art spy plane that could fly higher than the enemy’s fighter jets could climb or
than their antiaircraft missiles could travel. In that moment during Operation
Crossroads, Leghorn committed himself to developing this new philosophy of
spying on the enemy from above, a concept that would come to be known as
overhead, or aerial, espionage. Leghorn’s efforts would take him from the halls
of Congress to the corridors of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command.

There, he would be at odds with a third set of eyes watching the twenty-three-
kiloton Baker bomb at Crossroads. The eyes of Curtis LeMay.

LeMay’s perspective could not have been more diametrically opposed to
Leghorn’s spy plane idea. LeMay believed that atomic bombs, not conventional
explosives, won wars. Japan did not surrender after the firebombing of Tokyo.
The empire surrendered only after America dropped its second nuclear bomb.
During the atomic tests at Bikini, LeMay knew what only a few others knew, and
that was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recently reversed America’s long¬
standing national policy of only going to war if attacked first. The JCS’s new
and top secret first-strike policy, code-named Pincher, now allowed the
American military to “strike a first blow if necessary.” A single effort could
include as many as thirty atomic bombs dropped at once. The new and
unprecedented policy had begun as a planning document less than one month
after the Japanese surrendered, on August 15, 1945. Ten months later, on June
18, 1946, the policy legally took effect. No doubt this influenced LeMay’s

perspective at Crossroads.

When it came time for LeMay to present his observations on the test series to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he narrowed them down to three succinct points.
“Atomic bombs in numbers conceded to be available in the foreseeable future
can nullify any nation’s military effort and demolish its social and economic
structures.” In other words, LeMay would argue, America needed lots and lots of
these bombs. LeMay’s second point was even more extreme: “In conjunction
with other mass destruction weapons, it is possible to depopulate vast areas of
the Earth’s surface, leaving only vestigial remnants of man’s material works.”

But it was LeMay’s third point that would fundamentally shape the future U.S.
Air Force, which would come into existence the following year: “The atomic
bomb emphasizes the requirement for the most effective means of delivery in
being; there must be the most effective atomic bomb striking force possible.”
What LeMay was arguing for was a massive fleet of bombers to drop these
nuclear bombs.

LeMay got all three wishes. Three years later, after he was promoted to
commander of Strategic Air Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff would raise the
number of bombs that could be used in a first strike against the Soviets from 30
to 133. LeMay was also one of the most powerful advocates of the creation of a
new and thousand-times-bigger nuclear bomb, called the hydrogen bomb, the
plans of which were being spearheaded by Dr. Edward Teller. Over the next
forty-four years, seventy thousand nuclear weapons would be produced by the
United States. LeMay was definitely not interested in spy planes or overhead.

Spy planes didn’t have guns and they couldn’t carry weapons. Military might
was the way to keep ahead of the enemy in the atomic age. That was the way to
win wars.

Halfway across the world , in Moscow, in a military fortress called the Kremlin,
Joseph Stalin saw what was going on at Operation Crossroads but with an
altogether different set of eyes. First excluded from but then invited to the
Navy’s nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, the Soviet Union had two representatives
observing, one physicist and one spy. The physicist was with the Radium
Institute, and the spy was a member of the MBD, the Ministry of State Security,
which was the precursor to the KGB. The cover story for the spy was that he was
a correspondent for the newspaper Pravda.

To Joseph Stalin, the atomic tests at Bikini were America’s way of signaling

to the rest of the world that the nation was not done using nuclear bombs. It also
confirmed for the already paranoid Stalin that the Americans were ready to
deceive him, just as Adolf Hitler had four years earlier when Stalin agreed to a
nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany and then was double-crossed in a
deadly sneak attack. Unknown to the Americans, as Stalin watched Crossroads
he did so with confidence, knowing that his own nuclear program was well
advanced. In just five months, the Soviet Union’s first chain-reacting atomic pile
would go critical , paving the way for Russia’s first atomic bomb. But what has
never before been disclosed is that Joseph Stalin was developing another secret
weapon for his arsenal, separate from the atomic bomb. It was almost straight
from the radio hoax War of the Worlds —something that could sow terror in the
hearts of the fearful imperialists and send panic-stricken Americans running into
the streets.

Ten months passed. It was nighttime on the Rio Grande, May 29, 1947, and
Army scientists, engineers, and technicians at the White Sands Proving Ground
in New Mexico were anxiously putting the final touches on their own American
secret weapon, called Hermes . The twenty-five-foot-long, three-thousand-pound
rocket had originally been named V-2, or Vergeltungswaffe 2, which means
“vengeance” in German. But Hermes sounded less spiteful—Hermes being the
ancient Greek messenger of the gods.

The actual rocket that now stood on Test Stand 33 had belonged to Adolf
Hitler just a little more than two years before. It had come off the same German
slave-labor production lines as the rockets that the Third Reich had used to
terrorize the people of London, Antwerp, and Paris during the war. The U.S.
Army had confiscated nearly two hundred V-2s from inside Peenemiinde,
Germany’s rocket manufacturing plant, and shipped them to White Sands
beginning the first month after the war. Under a parallel, even more secret
project called Operation Paperclip —the complete details of which remain
classified as of 2011—118 captured German rocket scientists were given new
lives and careers and brought to the missile range. Hundreds of others would
follow.

Two of these German scientists were now readying Hermes for its test
launch. One, Wernher Von Braun , had invented this rocket, which was the
world’s first ballistic missile, or flying bomb. And the second scientist, Dr. Ernst
Steinhoff . had designed the V-2 rocket’s brain. That spring night in 1947, the V-2

lifted up off the pad, rising slowly at first, with Von Braun and Steinhoff
watching intently. Hermes consumed more than a thousand pounds of rocket fuel
in its first 2.5 seconds as it elevated to fifty feet. The next fifty feet were much
easier, as were the hundred feet after that. The rocket gained speed, and the laws
of physics kicked in: anything can fly if you make it move fast enough. Hermes
was now fully aloft, climbing quickly into the night sky and headed for the upper
atmosphere. At least that was the plan. Just a few moments later, the winged
missile suddenly and unexpectedly reversed course. Instead of heading north to
the uninhabited terrain inside the two-million-square-acre White Sands Proving
Ground, the rocket began heading south toward downtown El Paso, Texas.

Dr. Steinhoff was watching the missile’s trajectory through a telescope from
an observation post one mile south of the launchpad, and having personally
designed the V-2 rocket-guidance controls back when he worked for Adolf
Hitler, Dr. Steinhoff was the one best equipped to recognize errors in the test. In
the event that Steinhoff detected an errant launch, he would notify Army
engineers, who would immediately cut the fuel to the rocket’s motors via remote
control, allowing it to crash safely inside the missile range. But Dr. Steinhoff
said nothing as the misguided V-2 arced over El Paso and headed for Mexico.
Minutes later, the rocket crash-landed into the Tepeyac Cemetery, three miles
south of Juarez, a heavily populated city of 120,000. The violent blast shook
virtually every building in El Paso and Juarez, terrifying citizens of both cities,
who “swamped newspaper offices, police headquarters and radio stations with
anxious telephone inquiries.” The missile left a crater that was fifty feet wide
and twenty-four feet deep. It was a miracle no one was killed.

Army officials rushed to Juarez to smooth over the event while Mexican
soldiers were dispatched to guard the crater’s rim. The mission, the men, and the
rocket were all classified top secret; no one could know specific details about
any of this. Investigators silenced Mexican officials by cleaning up the large,
bowl-shaped cavity and paying for damages. But back at White Sands,
reparations were not so easily made. Allegations of sabotage by the German
scientists who were in charge of the top secret project overwhelmed the
workload of the intelligence officers at White Sands. Attitudes toward the former
Third Reich scientists who were now working for the United States tended to fall
into two distinct categories at the time. There was the let-bygones-be-bygones
approach, an attitude summed up by the Army officer in charge of Operation
Paperclip, Bosquet Wev, who stated that to preoccupy oneself with “picayune
details” about German scientists’ past actions was “beating a dead Nazi horse.”

The logic behind this thinking was that a disbanded Third Reich presented no
future harm to America but a burgeoning Soviet military certainly did—and if
the Germans were working for us, they couldn’t be working for them.

Others disagreed—including Albert Einstein. Five months before the Juarez
crash, Einstein and the newly formed Federation of American Scientists
appealed to President Truman: “We hold these individuals to be potentially
dangerous... Their former eminence as Nazi party members and supporters
raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key
positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.” For
Einstein, making deals with war criminals was undemocratic as well as
dangerous.

While the public debate went on, internal investigations began. And the
rocket work at White Sands continued. The German scientists had been testing
V-2s there for fourteen months, and while investigations of the Juarez rocket
crash were under way, three more missiles fired from Test Stand 33 crash-landed
outside the restricted facility: one near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and another
near Fas Cruces, New Mexico. A third went down outside Juarez, Mexico,
again. The German scientists blamed the near tragedies on old V-2 components.
Seawater had corroded some of the parts during the original boat trip from
Germany. But in top secret written reports, Army intelligence officers were
building a case that would lay blame on the German scientists. The War
Department intelligence unit that kept tabs on the German scientists had
designated some of the Germans at the base as “under suspicion of being
potential security risks.” When not working, the men were confined to a six-acre
section of the base. The officers’ club was off-limits to all the Germans,
including the rocket team’s leaders, Steinhoff and Von Braun. It was in this
atmosphere of failed tests and mistrust that an extraordinary event happened—
one that, at first glance, seemed totally unrelated to the missile launches.

During the first week of July 1947, U.S. Signal Corps engineers began tracking
two objects with remarkable flying capabilities moving across the southwestern
United States. What made the aircraft extraordinary was that, although they flew
in a traditional, forward-moving motion, the craft—whatever they were—began
to hover sporadically before continuing to fly on. This kind of technology was
beyond any aerodynamic capabilities the U.S. Air Force had in development in
the summer of 1947. When multiple sources began reporting the same data, it

became clear that the radar wasn’t showing phantom returns, or electronic
ghosts, but something real. Kirtland Army Air Force Base, just north of the
White Sands Proving Ground, tracked the flying craft into its near vicinity. The
commanding officer there ordered a decorated World War II pilot named Kenny
Chandler into a fighter jet to locate and chase the unidentified flying craft. This
fact has never before been disclosed.

Chandler never visually spotted what he’d been sent to look for. But within
hours of Chandler’s sweep of the skies, one of the flying objects crashed near
Roswell, New Mexico. Immediately, the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or
JCS, took command and control and recovered the airframe and some propulsion
equipment, including the crashed craft’s power plant, or energy source. The
recovered craft looked nothing like a conventional aircraft . The vehicle had no
tail and it had no wings. The fuselage was round, and there was a dome mounted
on the top. In secret Army intelligence memos declassified in 1994, it would be
referred to as a “flying disc.” Most alarming was a fact kept secret until now—
inside the disc, there was a very earthly hallmark: Russian writing. Block letters
from the Cyrillic alphabet had been stamped , or embossed, in a ring running
around the inside of the craft.

In a critical moment, the American military had its worst fears realized. The
Russian army must have gotten its hands on German aerospace engineers more
capable than Ernst Steinhoff and Wernher Von Braun—engineers who must have
developed this flying craft years before for the German air force, or Luftwaffe.
The Russians simply could not have developed this kind of advanced technology
on their own. Russia’s stockpile of weapons and its body of scientists had been
decimated during the war; the nation had lost more than twenty million people.
Most Russian scientists still alive had spent the war in the gulag. But the
Russians, like the Americans, the British, and the French, had pillaged Hitler’s
best and brightest scientists as war booty, each country taking advantage of them
to move forward in the new world. And now, in July of 1947, shockingly, the
Soviet supreme leader had somehow managed not only to penetrate U.S.
airspace near the Alaskan border , but to fly over several of the most sensitive
military installations in the western United States. Stalin had done this with
foreign technology that the U.S. Army Air Forces knew nothing about. It was an
incursion so brazen—so antithetical to the perception of America’s strong
national security, which included the military’s ability to defend itself against air
attack—that upper-echelon Army intelligence officers swept in and took control
of the entire situation. The first thing they did was initiate the withdrawal of the

original Roswell Army Air Field press release, the one that stated that a “flying
disc... landed on a ranch near Roswell,” and then they replaced it with the
second press release, the one that said that a weather balloon had crashed—
nothing more. The weather balloon story has remained the official cover story
ever since.

The fears were legitimate: fears that the Russians had hover-and-fly
technology, that their flying craft could outfox U.S. radar, and that it could
deliver to America a devastating blow. The single most worrisome question
facing the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time was: What if atomic energy propelled
the Russian craft ? Or worse, what if it dispersed radioactive particles, like a
modern-day dirty bomb? In 1947, the United States believed it still had a
monopoly on the atomic bomb as a deliverable weapon. But as early as June
1942, Hermann Goring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, had been
overseeing the Third Reich’s research council on nuclear physics as a weapon in
its development of an airplane called the Amerika Bomber , designed to drop a
dirty bomb on New York City. Any number of those scientists could be working
for the Russians. The Central Intelligence Group, the CIA’s institutional
predecessor, did not yet know that a spy at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a
man named Klaus Fuchs, had stolen bomb blueprints and given them to Stalin.

Or that Russia was two years away from testing its own atomic bomb. In the
immediate aftermath of the crash, all the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to go on from
the Central Intelligence Group was speculation about what atomic technology
Russia might have.

For the military, the very fact that New Mexico’s airspace had been violated
was shocking. This region of the country was the single most sensitive weapons-
related domain in all of America. The White Sands Missile Range was home to
the nation’s classified weapons-delivery systems. The nuclear laboratory up the
road, the Los Alamos Laboratory, was where scientists had developed the atomic
bomb and where they were now working on nuclear packages with a thousand
times the yield. Outside Albuquerque, at a production facility called Sandia
Base, assembly-line workers were forging Los Alamos nuclear packages into
smaller and smaller bombs. Forty-five miles to the southwest, at the Roswell
Army Air Field, the 509th Bomb Wing was the only wing of long-range bombers
equipped to carry and drop nuclear bombs.

Things went from complicated to critical at the revelation that there was a
second crash site. Paperclip scientists Wernher Von Braun and Ernst Steinhoff.
still under review over the Juarez rocket crash, were called on for their expertise.

Several other Paperclip scientists specializing in aviation medicine were brought
in. The evidence of whatever had crashed at and around Roswell, New Mexico,
in the first week of July in 1947 was gathered together by a Joint Chiefs of Staff
technical services unit and secreted away in a manner so clandestine , it followed
security protocols established for transporting uranium in the early days of the
Manhattan Project.

The first order of business was to determine where the technology had come
from. The Joint Chiefs of Staff tasked an elite group working under the direct
orders of G-2 Army intelligence to initiate a top secret project called Operation
Harass . Based on the testimony of America’s Paperclip scientists . Army
intelligence officers believed that the flying disc was the brainchild of two
former Third Reich airplane engineers, named Walter and Reimar Horten— now
working for the Russian military. Orders were drawn up. The manhunt was on .

Walter and Reimar Horten were two aerospace engineers whose importance
in seminal aircraft projects had somehow been overlooked when America and
the Soviet Union were fighting over scientists at the end of the war. The brothers
were the inventors of several of Hitler’s flying-wing aircraft, including one
called the Horten 229 or Horten IX, a wing-shaped, tailless airplane that had
been developed at a secret facility in Baden-Baden during the war. From the
Paperclip scientists at Wright Field, the Army intelligence investigators learned
that Hitler was rumored to have been developing a faster-flying aircraft that had
been designed by the brothers and was shaped like a saucer. Maybe, the
Paperclips said, there had been a later-model Horten in the works before
Germany surrendered, meaning that even if Stalin didn’t have the Horten
brothers themselves, he could very likely have gotten control of their blueprints
and plans.

The flying disc that crashed at Roswell had technology more advanced than
anything the U.S. Army Air Forces had ever seen. Its propulsion techniques
were particularly confounding. What made the craft go so fast? How was it so
stealthy and how did it trick radar? The disc had appeared on Army radar screens
briefly and then suddenly disappeared. The incident at Roswell happened just
weeks before the National Security Act, which meant there was no true Central
Intelligence Agency to handle the investigation. Instead, hundreds of Counter
Intelligence Corps (CIC) officers from the U.S. Army’s European command
were dispatched across Germany in search of anyone who knew anything about
Walter and Reimar Horten. Officers tracked down and interviewed the brothers’
relatives, colleagues, professors, and acquaintances with an urgency not seen

since Operation Alsos, in which Allied Forces sought information about Hitler’s
atomic scientists and nuclear programs during the war.

A records group of more than three hundred pages of Army intelligence
documents reveals many of the details of Operation Harass. They were
declassified in 1994, after a researcher named Timothy Cooper filed a request for
documents under the Freedom of Information Act. One memo, called “Air
Intelligence Guide for Alleged ‘Flying Saucer’ Type Aircraft,” detailed for CIC
officers the parameters of the flying saucer technology the military was looking
for, features which were evidenced in the craft that crashed at Roswell.

Extreme maneuverability and apparent ability to almost hover : A plan
form approximating that of an oval or disc with dome shape on the
surface; The ability to quickly disappear by high speed or by complete
disintegration; The ability to group together very quickly in a tight
formation when more than one aircraft are together; Evasive motion
ability indicating possibility of being manually operated, or possibly, by
electronic or remote control.

The Counter Intelligence Corps’ official 1947-1948 manhunt for the Horten
brothers reads at times like a spy novel and at times like a wild-goose chase. The
first real lead in the hunt came from Dr. Adolf Smekal of Frankfurt, who
provided CIC with a list of possible informants’ names. Agents were told a
dizzying array of alleged facts: Reimar was living in secret in East Prussia;
Reimar was living in Gottingen, in what had been the British zone; Reimar had
been kidnapped “presumably by the Russians” in the latter part of 1946. If you
want to know where Reimar is, one informant said, you must first locate Hannah
Reitsch, the famous aviatrix who was living in Bad Hauheim. As for Walter, he
was working as a consultant for the French; he was last seen in Frankfurt trying
to find work with a university there; he was in Dessau; actually, he was in
Russia; he was in Luxembourg, or maybe it was France. One German scientist
turned informant chided CIC agents. If they really wanted to know where the
Horten brothers were, he said, and what they were capable of, then go ask the
American Paperclip scientists living at Wright Field .

Neatly typed and intricately detailed summaries of hundreds of interviews
with the Horten brothers’ colleagues and relatives flooded the CIC. Army
intelligence officers spent months chasing leads, but most information led them

back to square one. In the fall of 1947, prospects of locating the brothers seemed
grim until November, when CIC agents caught a break. A former Messerschmitt
test pilot named Fritz Wendel offered up some firsthand testimony that seemed
real. The Horten brothers had indeed been working on a flying saucer-like craft
in Heiligenbeil, East Prussia, right after the war, Wendel said. The airplane was
ten meters long and shaped like a half-moon. It had no tail. The prototype was
designed to be flown by one man lying down flat on his stomach. It reached a
ceiling of twelve thousand feet. Wendel drew diagrams of this saucerlike aircraft,
as did a second German informant named Professor George, who described a
later-model Horten as being “very much like a round cake with a large sector cut
out” and that had been developed to carry more than one crew member. The
later-model Horten could travel higher and faster—up to 1,200 mph—because it
was propelled by rockets rather than jet engines. Its cabin was allegedly
pressurized for high-altitude flights.

The Americans pressed Fritz Wendel for more. Could it hover? Not that
Wendel knew. Did he know if groups could fly tightly together ? Wendel said he
had no idea. Were “high speed escapement methods” designed into the craft?
Wendel wasn’t sure. Could the flying disc be remotely controlled? Yes, Wendel
said he knew of radio-control experiments being conducted by Seimens and
Halske at their electrical factory in Berlin. Army officers asked Wendel if he had
heard of any hovering or near-hovering technologies. No. Did Wendel have any
idea about the tactical purposes for such an aircraft? Wendel said he had no idea.

The next batch of solid information came from a rocket engineer named
Walter Ziegler . During the war, Ziegler had worked at the car manufacturer
Bayerische Motoren Werke, or BMW, which served as a front for advanced
rocket-science research. There, Ziegler had been on a team tasked with
developing advanced fighter jet s powered by rockets. Ziegler relayed a chilling
tale that gave investigators an important clue. One night, about a year after the
war, in September of 1946, four hundred men from his former rocket group at
BMW had been invited by Russian military officers to a fancy dinner. The rocket
scientists were wined and dined and, after a few hours, taken home. Most were
drunk. Several hours later, all four hundred of the men were woken up in the
middle of the night by their Russian hosts and told they were going to be taking
a trip. Why Ziegler wasn’t among them was not made clear. The Germans were
told to bring their wives, their children, and whatever else they needed for a long
trip. Mistresses and livestock were also fine. This was not a situation to which
you could say no, Ziegler explained. The scientists and their families were

transported by rail to a small town outside Moscow where they had remained
ever since, forced to work on secret military projects in terrible conditions.
According to Ziegler, it was at this top secret Russian facility, exact whereabouts
unknown, that the German scientists were developing rockets and other
advanced technologies under Russian supervision. These were Russia’s version
of the American Paperclip scientists. It was very possible, Ziegler said, that the
Horten brothers had been working for the Russians at the secret facility there.

For nine long months, CIC agents typed up memo after memo relating
various theories about where the Horten brothers were, what their flying saucers
might have been designed for, and what leads should or should not be pursued.
And then, six months into the investigation, on March 12, 1948, along came
abrupt news. The Horten brothers had been found . In a memo to the European
command of the 970th CIC, Major Earl S. Browning Jr. explained. “The Horten
Brothers have been located and interrogated by American Agencies,” Browning
said. The Russians had likely found the blueprints of the flying wing after all. “It
is Walter Horten’s opinion that the blueprints of the Horten IX may have been
found by Russian troops at the Gotha Railroad Car Factory,” the memo read. But
a second memo, entitled “Extracts on Horten, Walter,” explained a little more.
Former Messerschmitt test pilot Fritz Wendel’s information about the Horten
brothers’ wingless, tailless, saucerlike craft that had room for more than one
crew member was confirmed. “Walter Horten’s opinion is that sufficient German
types of flying wings existed in the developing or designing stages when the
Russians occupied Germany, and these types may have enabled the Russians to
produce the flying saucer.”

There is no mention of Reimar Horten, the second brother, in any of the
hundreds of pages of documents released to Timothy Cooper as part of his
Freedom of Information Act request—despite the fact that both brothers had
been confirmed as located and interrogated. Nor is there any mention of what
Reimar Horten did or did not say about the later-model Horten flying discs. But
one memo mentioned “the Horten X” and another referred to “the Horten 13,”
No further details have been provided, and a 2011 Freedom of Information Act
request by the author met a dead end.

On May 12, 1948, the headquarters of European command sent the director
of intelligence at the United States Forces in Austria a puzzling memo. “Walter
Horten has admitted his contacts with the Russians.” it said. That was the last
mention of the Horten brothers in the Army intelligence’s declassified record for
Operation Harass.

Whatever else officially exists on the Horten brothers and their advanced
flying saucer continues to be classified as of 2011, and the crash remains from
Roswell quickly fell into the blackest regions of government. They would stay at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for approximately four years . From there, they
would quietly be shipped out west to become intertwined with a secret facility
out in the middle of the Nevada desert. No one but a handful of people would
have any idea they were there.

CHAPTER THREE

The Secret Base

It was a foggy evening in 1951 and Richard Mervin Bissell was sitting in his
parlor in Washington, DC, when there was an unexpected knock at the door.
There stood a man by the name of Frank Wisner. The two gentlemen had never
met before but according to Bissell, Wisner was “very much part of our inner
circle of people,” which included diplomats, statesmen, and spies. At the time,
Bissell held the position of the executor of finance of the Marshall Plan,
America’s landmark economic recovery plan to infuse postwar Europe with
thirteen billion dollars in cash that began in 1948. Being executor of finance
meant Bissell was the program’s top moneyman. All Bissell knew about Frank
Wisner at the time was that he was a top-level civil servant with the new Central
Intelligence Agency.

Wisner, a former Olympic competitor, had once been considered handsome.
An Office of Strategic Services spy during the war, Wisner was rumored to be
the paramour of Princess Caradja of Romania. Now, although not yet forty years
old, Wisner had lost his hair, his physique, and his good looks to what would
later be revealed as mental illness and alcoholism—but the true signs of his
downfall were not yet clear. During the fireside chat in Richard Bissell’s
Washington parlor, Bissell quickly learned that Frank Wisner was the man in
charge of a division of the CIA called the Office of Policy Coordination, or OPC.
At the time, not much was known about America’s intelligence agency because
the CIA was only three and a half years old. As for the mysterious office called
OPC . only a handful of people knew its true purpose. Bissell had heard in
cocktail conversation that OPC was “engaged in the battle against Communism
through covert means.” In reality, the bland-sounding Office of Policy

Coordination was the power center for all of the Agency’s covert operations. All
black and paramilitary operations ran through OPC. The office had been set up
by the former secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who was also the nation’s
first secretary of defense.

Seated beside the fire in the parlor that foggy evening in 1951, Wisner told
Bissell that the OPC needed money. “He asked me to help finance the OPC’s
covert operations by releasing a modest amount of funds generated by the
Marshall Plan .” Bissell later explained. Mindful of the gray-area nature of
Wisner’s request, Bissell asked for more details. Wisner declined, saying that
he’d already said what he was allowed to say. But Wisner assured Bissell that
Averell Harriman, the powerful statesman, financier, former ambassador to
Moscow, and, most important, Bissell’s superior at the Marshall Plan, had
approved the money request. “I could have confirmed Wisner’s story with
[Harriman] if I had any doubts,” Bissell recalled. But he had no such doubts.
And so, without hesitation, Richard Bissell agreed to siphon money from the
Marshall Plan and divert it to the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination. Largely
unknown until now, this was how a significant portion of the CIA’s earliest
covert black budgets came to be. Richard Bissell was the hidden hand.

Equally concerned about the nation’s needs in gathering intelligence was
Colonel Richard Leghorn. For Leghorn, the mock nuclear naval battle called
Operation Crossroads in 1946 had spurred him to action. Leghorn presented
papers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff arguing that overflying the Soviet Union to
learn about its military might was urgent business and not just something to
consider down the line. He walked the halls of the Pentagon with his papers
immediately after Crossroads in 1946, and again in 1948, but with no results.
Then along came another war. The Korean War has often been called the
forgotten war. In its simplest terms, it was a war between North Korea and South
Korea, but it was also the first trial of technical strength and scientific prowess
between two opposing teams of German-born scientists specializing in aviation.
One group of Germans worked for America now, as Paperclip scientists, and the
other group worked for the Soviet Union, and the jet-versus-jet dogfights in the
skies above Korea were fights between American-made F-86 Sabres and Soviet-
made MiG-15s, both of which had been designed by Germans who once worked
for Adolf Hitler.

When war was declared against Korea, Colonel Leghorn was called back into

active duty. As commander of the reconnaissance systems branch of the Wright
Air Development Center in Dayton, Ohio, Leghorn was now in charge of
planning missions for American pilots flying over denied territory in North
Korea and Manchuria to photograph weapons depots and missile sites. American
spy planes were accompanied by fighter jets for protection, but still the enemy
managed to shoot down an undisclosed number of American spy planes with
their MiG fighter jets. In these tragic losses, Leghorn saw a further opportunity
to strengthen his argument for overhead. Those MiGs could reach a maximum
altitude of only 45,000 feet, meaning that if the United States created a spy plane
that could get above 60,000 feet, the airplane would be untouchable. After the
armistice was signed, in 1953, Leghorn went back to Washington to present his
overhead espionage idea to Air Force officials again.

One man in a position to be interested was Lieutenant General Donald L.

Putt, the Army commander whose men had captured Hermann Goring’s
Volkenrode aircraft facility in Germany just before the end of the war as part of
Operation Lusty . Putt had smuggled one of the earliest groups of German
scientists, including V-2 rocket scientists Wernher Von Braun and Ernst
Steinhoff, out of the country and into America. Now, Putt was overseeing the
fruits of the scientists’ labor from inside his office at the Pentagon. Putt had been
promoted to deputy chief of staff for research and development at the Pentagon,
and the three stars on his chest afforded him great power and persuasion about
America’s military future involving airplanes. But Putt listened to a presentation
of Leghorn’s spy plane idea and immediately said that he was not interested. The
Air Force was not in the business of making dual-purpose aircraft, airplanes that
carried cameras in addition to weapons. Besides, Air Force airplanes came with
armor, Putt said, which made them heavy. Any flier in the early 1950s knew
heavy airplanes could not fly anywhere near sixty thousand feet.

Richard Leghorn was undeterred. He went around Putt by going above him,
to the commander of the Strategic Air Command, or SAC, his old antagonist
from Operation Crossroads General Curtis LeMay. In the winter of 1954, LeMay
was presented with the first actual drawings of Leghorn’s high-flying spy plane,
conceptualized by the Lockheed Corporation. Whereas Putt was uninterested in
Leghorn’s ideas, LeMay was offended by them. He walked out of the meeting
declaring that the whole overhead thing was a waste of his time.

But there was another group of men who had President Eisenhower’s ear, and
those men made up the select group of scientists who sat on the president’s
scientific advisory board, friends and colleagues of Colonel Richard Leghorn

from MIT. They included James R. Killian Jr., president of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, as well as Edwin H. Land, the eccentric millionaire who
had just invented the Polaroid camera and its remarkable instant film. The
president’s science advisers had an idea. Never mind the Air Force. Generals
tended to be uncreative thinkers, bureaucrats who lived inside a mental box.
Why not approach the Central Intelligence Agency? The Agency was made up
of men whose sole purpose was to conduct espionage. Surely they would be
interested in spying from the air. Unlike the Air Force, Killian and Land
reasoned , the CIA had access to the president’s secret financial reserves. All the
overhead espionage program really needed was a team captain or a patron saint.
As it turned out, they had someone in mind. It was February of 1954. A brilliant
economist who had formerly been running the financial office over at the
Marshall Plan had just joined the CIA as Director Allen Dulles’s special
assistant. His name was Richard Bissell. He was a perfect candidate for the
overhead job.

At least one of Richard Bissell’s ancestors was a spy. Sergeant Daniel Bissell
conducted espionage missions for General George Washington during the
Revolutionary War. Generations later, on September 18, 1910, Richard Mervin
Bissell Jr. was born into a family of Connecticut aristocrats. Severely cross-eyed
from birth, it was only after a risky surgery at the age of eight that Richard
Bissell could see clearly enough to read anything. Before that, his mother had
read to him. As a child, Bissell was obsessed with history and with war. His
parents took him on a visit to the battlefields of northern France when he was ten
years old, and it was there, staring out over barren fields ravaged by firebombs,
that Bissell developed what he would later describe as an overwhelming
“impression of World War I as a cataclysm.”

Despite great privilege, Bissell struggled through his formative years with
intense feelings of inadequacy, first at Groton boarding school, then later at Yale
University. But behind his low self-esteem was a great willfulness and
burgeoning self-confidence that would emerge shortly after he turned twenty-
one. On a weekend trip with family friends at a Connecticut beachhead called
Pinnacle Rock, Bissell fell off a seventy-foot cliff. When he woke up in the
hospital, he was suffering from a mild case of amnesia. But as soon as he was
well enough to move around on his own, which took months, he secretly
ventured back to the site of the fall. There he made the same climb again. “My

hands were shaking,” Bissell explained in describing the second climb, but “I
was glad to have done it and to know that I didn’t have to do it again.” He had
gone from unsure to self-assured, thanks to a death-defying fall. Immediately
after college, in 1932, Bissell headed to England, where he received a master’s
degree from the London School of Economics. Then it was back to Yale for a
PhD, where he wrote complex financial treatises at the astonishingly prolific rate
of twenty pages a day. Bissell’s colleagues began to admire him, calling him a
“human computer.” His mind, they said, functioned “like a machine.” Soon, the
classes he taught were filled to capacity.

Eventually, his talents as an economist caught the eye of MIT president
James Killian, who recruited Bissell to join the MIT staff. Now, in 1954, here
was James Killian recruiting Richard Bissell again, which was how just a few
short years after the fireside chat with Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell found
himself in charge of one of the most ambitious, most secret programs in CIA
history, the U-2 spy plane program. Its code name was Project Aquatone.

The following winter, in 1955, Richard Bissell and his fellow CIA officer
Herbert Miller, the Agency’s leading expert on Soviet nuclear weapons, flew
across the American West in an unmarked Beechcraft V-35 Bonanza in search of
a location where they could build a secret CIA test facility , the only one of its
kind on American soil. Only a handful of CIA officers and an Air Force colonel
named Osmond “Ozzie” Ritland had any idea what the men were up to, flying
around out there. Bissell’s orders, which had come directly from President
Eisenhower himself, were to find a secret location to build a test facility for the
Agency’s bold, new spy plane—the aircraft that would keep watch over the
Soviet Union’s burgeoning nuclear weapons program. Accompanying the CIA
officers was the nation’s leading aerodynamicist, Lockheed Corporation’s
Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the man tasked with designing and building this new
plane.

Johnson sat in the back of the Beechcraft with geological survey maps spread
out across his lap as the men flew from Burbank, California, across the Mojave
Desert, and into Nevada. They were searching for a dry lake bed called Groom
Lake just outside the Nevada Test Site, which had had its boundaries configured
by Holmes and Narver in July of 1950 during the top secret Project Nutmeg that
resulted in Nevada’s being chosen as America’s continental atomic bombing
range. Legendary air racer and experimental test pilot Tony LeVier was flying

the small airplane. LeVier had a vague idea of where he was going because his
fellow Lockheed test pilot Ray Goudey had taken him to Groom Lake on a
prescouting mission just a few weeks before. On occasion, Goudey had shuttled
atomic scientists from California to the test site and once he had even set down
his aircraft on Groom Lake to eat his bag lunch.

“Descending for a closer look, we saw evidence of a temporary landing
strip,” Bissell later recalled, “the kind of runway that had been built in various
locations across the United States during World War Two for the benefit of pilots
in training who might have to make an emergency landing.” The large, hardened
salt pan was a perfect natural runway, and LeVier effortlessly landed the plane.
The men got out and walked around, discussing how level the terrain was and
kicking the old shell casings lying about like stones. To the north, Bald Mountain
towered over the valley, offering cover, and to the southwest, there was equal
shelter from a mountain range called Papoose. According to Bissell, “Groom
Lake would prove perfect for our needs.”

Bissell was acutely aware that Groom Lake was just over the hill from the
government’s atomic bomb testing facility, which meant that as far as secrecy
was concerned, there was no better place in the continental United States for the
CIA to set up its new spy plane program and begin clandestine work. “I
recommended to Eisenhower that he add a piece of adjacent land, including
Groom Lake, to the Nevada Test Site of the Atomic Energy Commission,”

Bissell related in his memoir, written in the last year of his life. Four months
after Richard Bissell, Herbert Miller, Kelly Johnson, and Tony LeVier touched
down on Groom Lake, Area 51 had its first residents. It was a small group of
four Lockheed test pilots, two dozen Lockheed mechanics and engineers, a
handful of CIA officers who doubled as security guards, and a small group of
Lieutenant Colonel Ritland’s Air Force staff. There was a cowboy feel to the
base that first summer, with temperatures so hot the mechanics used to crack
eggs on metal surfaces just to see how long it would take for them to fry.

Originally the base consisted of one airplane hangar and a handful of tents,
called hooches, constructed out of wooden platforms and covered in canvas tops.
Sometimes when the winds got rough, the tents would blow away .

Thunderstorms were frequent and would render the dry lake bed unusable,
temporarily covered by an inch of rain. As soon as the sun returned, the water
would quickly evaporate, and the test pilots could fly again. Power came from a
diesel generator. There was one cook and a makeshift mess hall. It took another
month for halfway-decent showers to be built on the base. The men could have

been at an army outpost in Egypt or India as far as amenities were concerned.

Residents were issued work boots, to defend against rattlesnakes , and hats
with lights, to wear at night. When the sun dropped behind the mountains in the
evenings, the sky turned purple, then gray. In no time everything was pitch-
black. The sounds at night were cricket song and coyote howl, and there was
barely anything more than static on the radio and definitely no TV. The nearest
town, Las Vegas, had only thirty-five thousand residents, and it was seventy-five
miles away. At night, the skies at Area 51 glittered with stars.

But as rustic as the base was as far as appearance, behind the scenes Area 51
was as much Washington, DC, as it was Wild West. The U-2 was a top secret
airplane built on the covert orders of the president of the United States. Its 1955
budget was $22 million, which would be $180 million in 2011.

Each U-2 aircraft arrived at Area 51 from Lockheed’s facility in Burbank in
pieces, hidden inside the belly of a C-124 transport plane. The pointy fuselage
and long, thin wings were draped in white sheets so no one could get even a
glimpse. “In the very beginning, we put Ship One and Ship Two together inside
the hangar so nobody saw it before it flew,” recalls Bob Murphy, one of the first
Lockheed mechanics on the base. Lrom the moment the CIA began operating
their Groom Lake facility, they did so with very strict protocols regarding who
had a need-to-know and about what. All elements of the program were divided
into sensitive compartmented information, or SCI. “I had no clue what the
airplane looked like until it flew directly over my head,” recalls security guard
Richard Mingus.

Getting the U-2 operations ready was a dream job for the daring experimental
test pilot Ray Goudey. “I learned to fly an airplane before I could drive a car,”
Goudey explains. As a teenager, Goudey joined the flying circus and flew with
Sammy Mason’s famed Llying Brigade. After the war, he became part of a
daredevil flying team called the Hollywood Hawks, where his centrifugal-force-
defying outside snap made him a legend. In 1955 he was thirty-three years old
and ready to settle down, in relative terms.

Getting Lockheed’s tricky new spy plane ready for the CIA was not a terribly
daunting task for a flier like Goudey. Still, the U-2 was an unusual airplane, with
wings so long their ends sagged when it sat parked on the tarmac at Groom. To
keep its fuel-filled wings from tipping side to side on takeoff, mechanics had to
run alongside the airplane as it taxied, sending huge dust clouds up from the lake
bed and covering everything in fine sand. The aircraft’s aluminum skin was
paper-thin, just 0.02 inches thick, which meant the aircraft was both fragile on

the ground and extremely delicate to fly. If a pilot flew the U-2 too slow, the
airplane could stall. If he flew too fast, the wings could literally come off.
Complicating matters was the fact that what was too slow at one altitude was too
fast at another height. The same variable occurred when the weight of the plane
changed as it burned up hours of fuel. For these reasons, the original flights
made by the test pilots were restricted to a two-hundred-mile radius from the
center of Groom Lake. The likelihood of a crash was high, and the CIA needed
to be able to keep secure any U-2 wreckage.

“In the beginning, all we did was fly all day long,” Goudey recalls. At Area
51 “we’d sleep, wake up, eat, and fly.” Soon, the base expanded and one
hundred more people arrived. Navy Quonset huts were brought in and two
additional water wells were dug. Commander Bob Yancey located a pool table
and a 16-millimeter film projector in Las Vegas; now the men had entertainment
other than stargazing. By September, there were two hundred men on base from
three organizational groups: one-third were CIA, one-third were Air Force, and
one-third were Lockheed. Everyone had the same goal in mind, which was to get
the U-2 to sustain flight at seventy thousand feet. This was a tall order and
something no air force in the world had been able to accomplish.

Every Monday Ray Goudey would fly from Burbank to Groom Lake with
Lockheed’s gung-ho young mechanic Bob Murphy beside him in the passenger
seat. All week, Murphy worked on the U-2’s engine while Goudey worked with
the other test pilots to achieve height. The pilots wore specially designed partial-
pressure suits, tight like wet suits, with most of the tubing on the outside; it took
two flight surgeons to get a pilot into his suit. Pre-breathing pure oxygen was
mandatory and took two full hours, which made for a lot of time in a recliner .
The process removed nitrogen from the pilot’s bloodstream and reduced the risk
of decompression sickness at high altitude.

In those early days at Area 51, history was being laid down and records were
being set. “I was the first guy to go up above sixty-five thousand feet, but I
wasn’t supposed to be,” Goudey recalls. “Bob Mayte was scheduled to do the
first high-altitude flight but he had a problem with his ears. So I went instead.”
Which is how Goudey ended up becoming the first pilot to ever reach that
altitude and fly there for a sustained amount of time—a remarkable fact noted in
the Lockheed record books and yet kept from the rest of the world until 1998,
when the U-2 program was finally declassified. Goudey explains what the view
was like at sixty-five thousand feet: “From where I was up above Nevada I could
see the Pacific Ocean, which was three hundred miles away.”

Ray Goudey was also the world’s first test pilot to experience engine failure
at sixty-four thousand feet, a potentially catastrophic event because the delicate
U-2 is a single-engine airplane: if a U-2 loses one engine, it has lost all of them.
In Goudey’s case, he glided down four thousand feet and got the engine to restart
by using a tactic called windmilling. “Then it quit again,” Goudey explains. He
let the plane fall another thirty thousand feet, more than five miles. Down in
lower air, Goudey was able to get the engine to restart—and to stay started. Once
Goudey was on the ground, it was Bob Murphy’s job to troubleshoot what had
happened on the engine. Of course, in 1955, no mechanic in the world had any
experience solving a combustion problem on an engine that had quit
unexpectedly at sixty-four thousand feet.

Bob Murphy was a twenty-five-year-old flight-test mechanic whose can-do
attitude and ability to troubleshoot just about any problem on an aircraft engine
meant he was promoted to engine mechanic supervisor the following winter, in
1956. “The romance of the job was the hands-on element of things,” Murphy
recalls of those early days at Groom Lake. “There was absolutely no government
meddling, which enabled us to get the job done.” There was only one man with
any kind of serious oversight at Area 51 and that was Richard Bissell, or Mr. B,,
as he was known to the men . Most of Bissell’s work involved getting Area 51 to
mn like an organization or, as he put it, “dealing with the policy matters involved
in producing this radically new aircraft.” Shuttling back and forth between
Washington and Area 51, Bissell seemed to enjoy the base he ruled over. “He
moved around the facility somewhat mysteriously,” Bob Murphy recalls. “He
would appear briefly out on the dry lake bed to say hi to the pilots and
mechanics and watch the U-2 fly,” Murphy remembers. “Mr. B. always
expressed enthusiasm for what we were doing and then he’d disappear again in
some unmarked airplane.” But for Murphy, the concern was rarely the Customer,
which was Lockheed’s code name for the CIA. Murphy was too busy working
with test pilots, often finding himself in charge of overseeing two or three U-2
flights in a single day. “My job was to help the pilots to get the aircraft
instruments checked out, get the plane to fly to seventy thousand feet, get it to
fly for nine and ten hours straight, and then get it to start taking pictures. There
was no shortage of work. We loved it and it’s what we did day after day.”

The job of the Lockheed test pilots was to get the U-2 ready as fast as
possible so they could turn it over to the CIA’s instructor pilot Hank
Meierdierck . who would then teach the CIA mission pilots, recruited from Air
Force bases around the country, how to fly the airplane. Bissell’s ambitious plan

was to overfly the Soviet Union inside of a year. The Communist advances in
hydrogen bombs and long-range missiles had the CIA seriously concerned, as
did the hastily hushed Soviet overflight of—and crash in—the West. Human
intelligence, or HUMINT, behind the Iron Curtain was at an all-time low. The
great news for the Agency was that there was no such thing as an Iron Ceiling.
Overhead was what was going to keep America safe. The U-2 was the Agency’s
best chance to get hard intelligence on the Soviet Union, considering that one
photograph could provide the Agency with as much information as
approximately ten thousand spies on the ground.

President Eisenhower put the CIA in charge of the overhead reconnaissance
because, as he later wrote, the aerial reconnaissance program needed to be
handled in an “unconventional wav.” What that meant was that President
Eisenhower wanted the program to be black, or hidden from Congress and from
everyone but a select few who needed to know about it. He also wanted the U-2
to be piloted by a man who didn’t wear a uniform. Before the U-2, there was no
precedent for one nation to regularly spy on another nation from overhead during
peacetime. The president’s fear was that if a U-2 mission was exposed, it would
be interpreted by the Soviets, and perhaps by the whole world, as an overtly
hostile act. At least if the plane had a CIA pilot, the president could deny the
U.S. military was involved.

Despite his apparent elusiveness, Mr. B. maintained absolute control of all
things that were going on at Area 51. Remarkably, he had been able to set up the
remote desert facility as a stand-alone organization : he did this by persuading
President Eisenhower to remove the U-2 program from the CIA’s own
organizational chart. “The entire project became the most compartmented and
self-contained activity within the agency,” Bissell wrote of his sovereign
territory at Groom Lake. “I worked behind a barrier of secrecy that protected my
decision making from interference.” The Development Project Staff, which was
the bland-sounding code name for the secret U-2 operation, was the only
division of the CIA that had its own communications office. Bissell saw
government overseers as unnecessary meddlers and told colleagues that
Congress and its committees simply got in the way of getting done what needed
to be done. In this way, Bissell was remarkably effective with his program at
Area 51. Each month he summed up activities on the secret base in a five-page
brief for the president. But Bissell’s long leash, and the extreme power he

wielded over the nation’s first spy plane program, earned him enmity from a top
general whose wrath was historically a dangerous thing to incur. That was
General Curtis LeMay.

While the CIA was in charge of Project Aquatone as a whole, U-2 operations
were to be a collaborative effort among the CIA, the Air Force, and Lockheed
Corporation. Lockheed built the airplane and provided the first test pilots as well
as the program mechanics. The Air Force was in charge of support operations. It
was there to provide everything the CIA needed, from chase planes to tire
changers. But Richard Bissell exercised his power early on, making Lockheed,
not the Air Force, his original Project Aquatone partner. Bissell worked hand in
hand with Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson to get the U-2 aloft with as little Air Force
involvement as possible. In fact, the Air Force was almost entirely left out of the
early planning stages. The first U-2 was built by Lockheed and flight-tested at
Groom Lake by Lockheed test pilots before the commander of the Air Force
research and development office had ever heard of an airplane called the U-2 or
a test-flight facility called Area 51. This overt slight ticked off many top
generals, a number of whom developed grudges against the CIA. And yet, by the
end of 1955, dozens of active-duty Air Force personnel had been assigned to the
U-2 operation. Air Force air expertise was absolutely necessary now that pilot
training had begun and multiple U-2s were flying multiple practice missions
every day, as the CIA readied Project Aquatone for assignments overseas.
Richard Bissell, not Curtis LeMay, was now the de facto base commander of a
whole lot of Air Force officers and enlisted men. LeMay was, understandably,
enraged .

In early autumn of 1955, a conflict erupted between the two men, and
President Eisenhower was forced to intervene. LeMay had been raising
questions about why he wasn’t in charge of the program. It was now up to the
president to decide who was officially in charge of Area 51 and the U-2. Bissell
desperately wanted to reign over the prestigious program. “It was a glamorous
and high-priority endeavor endorsed not only by the president but by a lot of
very important scientific people,” Bissell wrote in his memoirs decades later.
LeMay argued that the Air Force should be in charge of all programs involving
airplanes, which was ironic, given the fact that LeMay had disliked the U-2
program from the get-go. In hindsight it seems as if LeMay wanted the U-2
program simply because he wanted the control.

Ultimately, the president’s decision came to rest on one significant quality
that the CIA possessed and the Air Force did not: plausible deniability. With the

CIA in charge, if a U-2 were to get shot down, the government could claim the
spy plane program didn’t exist. Air Force fliers flew in uniform, but U-2 pilots
working for the CIA would wear civilian garb. The cover story for such a
mission would be weather-related research; at least, that was the plan. And so, in
late October of 1955, the dispute was settled by President Eisenhower. He
directed Air Force chief of staff Nathan Twining to give the CIA control over the
spy plane program and Area 51. The job of the Air Force, Eisenhower said, was
to offer all necessary operational support to keep the program aloft.

One of the Air Force’s designated jobs was to handle flights to and from Area
51. Because the project was so secret, Bissell did not want personnel driving in
and out of the base or living in Las Vegas. As far as Bissell was concerned, men
cleared on the project were far more likely to draw attention to themselves
driving to and from Sin City than they would be if they lived out of town and
came in and out by airplane. Locals had friends in the area, whereas out-of-
towners did not. This meant that each day, a C-54 transport plane shuttled
workers from Lockheed’s airport facility in Burbank, California, to Area 51 and
back. Ray Goudey and Bob Murphy had enjoyed four months of Goudey’s
flying the pair back and forth between Burbank and the Ranch. Now they would
have to commute on the Air Force’s C-54 like everyone else.

Bob Murphy was well versed in the mechanics of the C-54 aircraft. He’d
been an engineer on that aircraft in Germany during the Berlin airlift of 1948-
1949, the first major international crisis of the Cold War. From a military base in
Wiesbaden, Murphy serviced the C-54s that ferried coal and other supplies into
Berlin. Flying back and forth between Burbank and the Ranch, Bob Murphy
would often chat with George Pappas , the experienced Air Force classified-
missions pilot who flew the shuttle service. Pappas and Murphy spent hours
talking about what an interesting aircraft the C-54 was.

On the night of November 16, 1955, Pappas flew Murphy, Ray Goudey, and
another Lockheed pilot named Robert Sieker from the Ranch to Burbank so the
men could attend a Lockheed party at the Big Oaks Lodge in Bouquet Canyon.
For Bob Murphy, it would be a one-night stay; he was scheduled for the early-
morning flight back with Pappas’s C-54 Air Force shuttle the following day. But
Murphy drank too much at the party and overslept. As Bob Murphy was sleeping
through his alarm clock, eleven men assigned to Richard Bissell’s Project
Aquatone walked across the tarmac at the Burbank airport and boarded the C-54
transport plane where Pappas, his copilot Paul E. Winham, and a flight attendant
named Guy R. Fasolas prepared to shuttle everyone back to Area 51. The

manifest listed their destination as “Watertown airstrip.” A little over an hour
after takeoff, Pappas broke his required radio silence and called out for
assistance with his position in the air. It was snowing heavily where he was,
somewhere north of Las Vegas, and Pappas worried he had strayed off course.
Nearby, at Nellis Air Force Base, a staff sergeant by the name of Alfred Arneho
overheard the bewildering transmission. There was no record of any flight,
military or civilian, scheduled to be in his area this time of day. Arneho listened
for a follow-up transmission but none came. Puzzled, Arneho made a note in a
logbook. Just a few minutes later the airplane Pappas was flying crashed into the
granite peak of Mount Charleston, killing everyone on board. Had Pappas been
just thirty feet higher , he would have cleared the mountaintop.

Back in California, Bob Murphy awoke in a panic. He checked his alarm
clock and realized that he had missed the flight back to Area 51 by three hours.
Murphy was furious with himself. Getting drunk and oversleeping was
completely out of character for him. He had never missed a single day of work in
his four-year career at Lockheed. He’d never even been late. Murphy knew there
was no sense going to the airport; the airplane would have long since departed.
He got himself together and went out to find some breakfast. Bob Murphy was
sitting in a restaurant listening to the radio playing behind the counter when the
music was interrupted with breaking news. A C-54 transport plane had just
crashed into Mount Charleston, north of Las Vegas. The newscaster said that
reports were sketchy but most likely everyone on board had been killed. Murphy
knew immediately that the aircraft that had crashed into Mount Charleston was
the C-54 he would have been on had he not overslept.

Overwhelmed with grief and in a state of disbelief, Murphy went back to his
apartment. He paced around for some time. Then he decided to locate a bar and
have a drink. “As I opened the front door to my apartment, this guy from
Lockheed was raising his hand to knock on it,” Murphy explains fifty-four years
later. “I looked at him and he looked at me and then he turned white as a ghost. I
had been listed on the CIA flight manifest as having been on that airplane. The
security officer on the tarmac had marked me off as having checked in for the
flight. This man from Lockheed had come to inform my next of kin that I was
dead. Instead, there I was.”

Two hundred and fifty miles to the east, on top of Mount Charleston, the
wreckage of the airplane still burned. Smoke from the crash was visible as far
away as Henderson, ten miles south of Las Vegas. That afternoon, a CBS news
team was halfway up Highway 158, headed to the crash site, when the newsmen

met a military blockade. Armed officers told the news crew that a military plane
had crashed on a routine mission heading to the base at Indian Springs. The road
into Kyle Canyon was closed. Meanwhile, Bissell had U-2s dispatched from
Area 51 to help pinpoint the exact location of the Air Force airplane—an
impromptu and unorthodox first “mission” for the spy plane, triggered by tragic
circumstances. But there were briefcases full of secret papers that needed to be
retrieved, and the U-2’s search-and-locate capabilities from high above were
accurate and available. It was Hank Meierdierck, the man in charge of training
CIA pilots to fly the U-2, who ultimately located the remains of the airplane.

The crash was the first of a series of Area 51-related airplane tragedies that
would occur over the next decade. Airplane crashes, sensational by nature, risk
operational exposure, and between crash investigators and local media, there are
countless opportunities for leaks. That first airplane crash, into Mount
Charleston, set a precedent for the CIA in an unexpected way. The Agency did
what it always does: secured the crash site immediately and produced a cover
story for the press. But an interesting turn of events unfolded, ones that were
entirely beyond the CIA’s control. Hungry for a story and lacking any facts, the
press put together its own, inaccurate version of events. One of the city’s leading
papers, the Las Vegas Review Journal, reported that the crash was being kept
secret because the men on board were most likely nuclear scientists working on
a top secret new weapons project at the Nevada Test Site. Reporters stopped
asking questions and the speculative story quickly became accepted as fact. The
CIA would learn from this experience: it could use the public’s preconceptions
as well as the media’s desire to tell a story to its own benefit. Civilians could
unwittingly propagate significant disinformation on the CIA’s behalf.

In Central Intelligence Agency parlance, there are two kinds of strategic
deception: cover and disinformation. Cover induces the belief that something
true is something false; disinformation aims to produce the belief that something
false is in fact true. In other words, cover conceals the truth while disinformation
conveys false information. When the CIA disseminates false information, it is
always intended to mislead. When the press disseminates false information that
helps keep classified information a secret, the CIA sits back and smiles. The
truth about the crash at Mount Charleston, the single biggest loss of life for the
U-2 program, would remain hidden from the public until the CIA acknowledged
the plane crash in 2002 . Until then, even the families of the men in the airplane
had no idea that their loved ones had been working on a top secret CIA program
when they died.

As a result of the crash, the Air Force lost its job as the air carrier for Area
51. For the next seventeen years, commuter flights in and out of the base would
be operated by Lockheed. Starting sometime around 1972, the CIA began
turning control of Area 51 over to the Air Force, and the Department of Defense
took charge of commuter flights. But rather than running military aircraft to and
from the clandestine facility, the DOD hired the engineering company EG&G to
do it. It made sense. By 1972, EG&G had gotten so powerful and so trusted in
the uppermost echelons of the government, it was even in charge of some of the
security systems for Air Force One .

CHAPTER FOUR

The Seeds of a Conspiracy

As soon as the U-2s started flying out of Area 51. reports of UFO sightings by
commercial airline pilots and air traffic controllers began to inundate CIA
headquarters. Later painted black to blend in with the sky, the U-2s at that time
were silver, which meant their long, shiny wings reflected light down from the
upper atmosphere in a way that led citizens all over California, Nevada, and
Utah to think the planes were UFOs. The altitude of the U-2 alone was enough to
bewilder people. Commercial airplanes flew at between ten thousand and twenty
thousand feet in the mid-1950s, whereas the U-2 flew at around seventy
thousand feet. Then there was the radical shape of the airplane to consider. Its
wings were nearly twice as long as the fuselage, which made the U-2 look like a
fiery flying cross .

In 1955 the UFO phenomenon sweeping America was seven years old. The
modern-day UFO craze officially began on June 24, 1947, when a search-and-
rescue pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted nine flying discs speeding over
Washington State while he was out searching for a downed airplane.
Approximately two weeks later, the crash at Roswell occurred . By the end of the
month, more than 850 UFO sightings had been reported in the news media.
Rumors of flying saucers were sweeping the nation, and public anxiety was
mounting; Americans demanded answers from the military.

According to a CIA study on UFOs, declassified in 1997, the Air Force had
originally been running two programs. One was covert, initially called Project
Saucer and later called Project Sign : another was an overt Air Force public
relations campaign called Project Grudge . The point of Project Grudge was to
“persuade the public that UFOs constituted nothing unusual or extraordinary,”

and to do this, Air Force officials went on TV and radio dismissing UFO reports.
Sightings were attributed to planets, meteors, even “large hailstones,” Air Force
officials said, categorically denying that UFOs were anything nefarious or out of
this world. But their efforts did very little to appease the public. With the nuclear
arms race in full swing, the idea that the world could come to an end in nuclear
holocaust had tipped the psychological scales for many Americans, giving way
to public discussion about Armageddon and the End of Times. In 1951,
Hollywood released the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, about aliens
preparing to destroy Earth. Two years later, The War of the Worlds was made
into a movie and won an Academy Award. Even the famous psychiatrist Carl
Jung got into the act, publishing a book that said UFOs were individual mirrors
of a collective anxiety the world was having about nuclear annihilation.

Sightings continued and so did intense interest by both the Air Force and the
CIA.

At Area 51, the reality that the U-2 was repeatedly being mistaken for a UFO
was not something analysts welcomed, but it was something they were forced to
address. The general feeling at the Agency was that CIA officers had more
important things to do than handle the public hysteria about strange objects in
the sky. Dealing with UFO reports, the CIA felt, was more appropriately suited
for pencil pushers over at the Air Force. According to declassified documents,
the CIA did open up a clandestine UFO data-collecting department, albeit
begrudgingly. Seeing as the CIA could easily clear its own analysts to handle
information on the U-2, this made sense. This attitude, that CIA officers were
above plebeian affairs such as UFO sightings, was endemic at the Agency and
trickled down from the top. CIA director Allen Dulles was an elitist at heart, an
old-school spy brought up in the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II
espionage division of the Army. Dulles preferred gentlemen spy craft and
disliked technology in general , which was why he’d delegated control of the U-2
spy plane to Richard Bissell in the first place. As for the UFO problems, Dulles
assigned that job to a former OSS colleague named Todos M. Odarenko. The
UFO division was placed inside the physics office, which Odarenko ran. Almost
immediately Odarenko “sought to have his division relieved of the responsibility
for monitoring UFO reports,” according to a CIA monograph declassified in
1997. And yet the significance of UFOs to the CIA could not have had a higher
national security concern.

The case file regarding unidentified flying objects that Allen Dulles had
inherited from the Agency’s previous director, General Walter Bedell Smith .

was, and remains, one of the most top secret files in CIA history. Because it has
yet to be declassified, there is no way of knowing how much information Bedell
Smith shared with his successor. But Bedell Smith himself would more likely
than not have had a need-to-know about the Army intelligence’s blackest
programs, and that would have included the flying disc retrieved at Roswell .
When the crash occurred, in July of 1947, Bedell Smith was the ambassador to
the Soviet Union . During the search for the Horten brothers under the program
known as Operation Harass, Bedell Smith was serving as commander of the First
Army at Governors Island. New York —a locale from which Project Paperclip
scientists were monitored, evaluated, and assigned research and engineeering
jobs. And when the crash remains left Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio
to be shipped out to the desert in Nevada, Bedell Smith was the director of the
CIA. The degree of need-to-know access he had regarding secret parallel
programs set up there remains one of the great riddles of Area 51.

Walter Bedell Smith served as director of Central Intelligence from 1950 to
1953, and there were few men more trusted by President Harry Truman and five-
star general of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower. Years earlier, when General
Eisenhower had been serving as Supreme Allied Commander of Europe during
World War II, Bedell Smith was his chief of staff. A handful of Smith’s closest
colleagues affectionately called him Beetle, but most men were intimidated by
the person privately referred to as Eisenhower’s “hatchet man.” So forceful was
Bedell Smith that when George S. Patton needed discipline, the task fell on
Bedell Smith’s shoulders. When the Nazis surrendered to the Allied Forces, it
was Bedell Smith who was in charge of writing up acceptable terms.

From the earliest days of the Cold War, General Walter Bedell Smith fought
the Russians from America’s innermost circle of power. He had served as
President Truman’s ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1946 to 1948, a
position that uniquely qualified him to be the second director of the CIA.
Intelligence on the Soviet Union was the CIA’s primary concern in the early days
of the Cold War, and there was nothing the U.S. government knew regarding
what the Russians were up to that Bedell Smith did not have access to. The
conundrum for Smith when he took over the role of director of Central
Intelligence on August 21, 1950, was that very few people at the CIA had a
need-to-know what the general now knew regarding unidentified flying objects.
The record that has been declassified thus far suggests that Bedell Smith
demanded that all his employees accept what his personal experiences with the
Russians and “UFOs” had taught him: the Communists were evil, and this idea

that UFOs were coming from other planets was nothing but the fantasy of
panicked, paranoid minds. General Smith summarily rejected the idea that UFOs
were anything out of this world and he spearheaded CIA policy accordingly.
“Preposterous,” he wrote in a memo in 1952. Unlike Dulles, Bedell Smith
personally oversaw the national security implications regarding UFOs at the
CIA.

To a rationalist like General Smith, “Strange things in the sky [have] been
recorded for hundreds of years,” which is true—unidentified flying objects are at
least as old as the Bible. In certain translations of the Old Testament, a reference
to “Ezekiel’s wheel” describes a saucerlike vehicle streaking across the skies.
During the Middle Ages, flying discs appeared in many different forms of art ,
such as in paintings and mosaics. In British ink prints from 1783, favored
examples among ufologists, two of the king’s men stand on the terrace of
Windsor Castle in London observing small saucers flying in the background;
researchers have not been able to identify what they might have referenced.
Smith could offer no “obvious... single explanation for a majority of the things
seen” in the sky and cited foo fighters as an example, the “unexplained
phenomena sighted by aircraft pilots during World War II.” These, Smith
explained, were “balls of light... similar to St. Elmo’s fire.”

Like the president’s science adviser Vannevar Bush, CIA director Walter
Bedell Smith was primarily concerned about the government’s ability to
maintain control. Toward this end, he saw the CIA as having to take decisive
action regarding citizen hysteria over UFOs. During Bedell Smith’s tenure, and
according to declassified documents, it was the position of the CIA that a
nefarious plan was in the Soviet pipeline. It had happened once already, at
Roswell. Fortunately, in that instance the Joint Chiefs had been able to cover up
the truth with a weather balloon story. But a black propaganda attack could
happen again, a grand UFO hoax aimed at paralyzing the nation’s early air-
defense warning system, which would then make the United States vulnerable to
an actual Soviet air attack. “Mass receipt of low-grade reports which tend to
overload channels of communication quite irrelevant to hostile objects might
some day appear” as real, Smith ominously warned the National Security
Council. The unending UFO sightings preoccupying the nation were becoming
like the boy who cried wolf , the CIA director cautioned.

To work on the problem of UFO hysteria, in 1952 Bedell Smith convened a
CIA group called the Psychological Strategy Board and gave them the job of
putting together recommendations about “problems connected with unidentified

flying objects” for the National Security Council—the highest-ranking national
security policy makers in the United States. Bedell Smith’s Psychological
Strategy Board panel determined that the American public was far too sensitive
to “hysterical mass behavior” for the good of the nation. Furthermore, the board
said, the public’s susceptibility to UFO belief was a national security threat, one
that was increasing by the year. From a psychological standpoint, the public’s
gullibility would likely prove “harmful to constituted authority,” meaning the
central government might not hold. Any forthcoming UFO hoax by Stalin could
engender the same kind of pandemonium that followed the radio broadcast of
The War of the Worlds.

Bedell Smith’s CIA told the National Security Council that for this reason,
the flying saucer scare needed to be discredited. According to CIA documents
declassified in 1993, the Agency proposed a vast “debunking” campaign to
reduce the public’s interest in flying saucers. The only way of countering what
Bedell Smith was certain was the Russians’ “clever hostile propaganda” was for
the CIA to take covert action of its own. The Agency suggested that an
educational campaign be put in place, one that would co-opt elements of the
American “mass media such as television, motion pictures, and popular articles.”
The CIA also suggested getting advertising executives, business clubs, and “even
the Disney Corporation [involved] to get the message across.” One plan was to
present actual UFO case histories on television and then prove them wrong. “As
in the case of conjuring tricks,” members of the panel suggested, “the debunking
would result in reduction in public interest in flying saucers,” in the same way
that those who believe in magic become disillusioned when the magician’s trick
is revealed.

What action was actually taken by the CIA remains classified as of 2011, but
one unforeseen problem that Bedell Smith’s CIA encountered was an American
press wholly uninterested in going along with the wishes of the CIA. The media
had an agenda of its own. UFO stories sold papers, and in the spring of 1952, the
publishers of Life magazine were getting ready to go to press with a major scoop
about UFOs. Reporters for the magazine had learned that the Air Force had been
keeping top secret files on flying saucers while insisting to the public it was
doing no such thing. It was a big story, likely to sell out copies of the magazine.
One week before press time, the Air Force got wind of Life’s story. In a move
meant to deflate the magnitude of the magazine’s revelation, the Air Force
decided to reverse its five-year position of denying that it had been actively
investigating flying discs and to attend, of all things, a UFO convention in Los

Angeles, California.

To understand what a radical about-face this was for the Air Force requires an
understanding of what the Air Force had been doing for the past five years since
it had began the simultaneous and contradictory campaigns Project Sign (to
investigate Air Force UFO concerns) and Project Grudge (the public relations
campaign intended to convey to the nation that the Air Force had no UFO
concerns). Of the 850 UFO sightings reported in the news media the first month
of the UFO craze, in July of 1947, at least 150 of the sightings had concerned
military intelligence officials to such a degree that they were written up and sent
for analysis to officers with the Technical Intelligence Division of the Air Force
at Wright Field. Six months later, in January of 1948, General Nathan Twining,
head of the Air Force Technical Service Command, established Project Sign;
originally called Project Saucer , it was the first in a number of covert UFO
research groups created inside the Air Force. For Project Sign, the Air Force
assigned hundreds of its staff to the job of collecting, going over, and analyzing
details from thousands of UFO sightings, all the while denying they were doing
any such thing.

In Air Force circles, behind the scenes, officials were acutely aware that “the
very existence of Air Force official interest” fanned the flames of UFO hysteria,
and so the public relations program Project Grudge needed to officially end. On
December 27, 1949, the Air Force publicly announced that it saw no reason to
continue its UFO investigations and was terminating the project. Meanwhile, the
covert UFO study programs steamed ahead. In 1952, the Air Force opened up
yet another, even more secret UFO organization, this one called Project Blue
Book. That the Air Force clearly kept from the public what it was actually doing
with UFO study would later become a major point of contention for ufologists
who believed UFOs were from out of this world.

The UFOs being reported seemed to have no end. In addition to the flying
disc sightings, bright, greenish-colored lights in the sky were also reported by a
growing number of citizens. This was particularly concerning for the Air Force
because many of these sightings were in New Mexico near sensitive military
facilities such as Los Alamos, Sandia, and White Sands. Witnesses to these
“green balls of light,” which had been reported since the late 1940s, included
credible scientists and astronomers. These sightings were put into an Air Force
category known as Green Fireballs . In 1949, the Geophysics Research Division

of the Air Force initiated Project Twinkle specifically to investigate these various
light-related phenomena. Observation posts were set up at Air Force bases
around the country where physicists made electromagnetic-frequency
measurements using Signal Corps engineering laboratory equipment. In secret,
air traffic control operators across the nation were given 35-millimeter cameras
called vidoons and asked by the Air Force to photograph anything unusual. All
work was performed under top secret security protocols with the caveat that
under no circumstances was the public to know that the Air Force was
investigating UFOs. As the files for Project Twinkle and Project Blue Book got
fatter by the month, Air Force officials repeatedly told curious members of
Congress that no such files existed.

For Air Force investigators, the UFO explanations trickled in. One group of
scientists assigned to Holloman Air Force Base, located on the White Sands
Missile Range and home to the Paperclip scientists, determined many of the
sightings were observations of V-2 rocket contrails. Other sightings were
determined to be shooting stars, cosmic rays, and planets visible in the sky.
Another study group concluded that some responsibility fell on birds, most
commonly “flocks of seagulls or geese.” But the numbers of sightings were
overwhelming. By 1951, the Air Force had secretly investigated between 800
and 1,000 UFO sightings across the nation, according to a CIA Studies in
Intelligence report on UFOs declassified in 1997. By 1952, that number rose to
1,900. The efforts were stunning. Data-collection officers met with hundreds of
citizens, all of whom were told not to disclose that the Air Force had met with
them and asked to sign inadvertent-nondisclosure forms. Classified for decades,
these investigations have resulted in over thirty-seven cubic feet of case files—
approximately 74,000 pages. But for every one or two hundred sightings that
could be explained, there were always a few that could not be explained—
certainly not by Air Force data-collection supervisors who had a very limited
need-to-know. Seeds of suspicion were being sown among these Air Force
investigators and in some cases among their superiors, a number of whom would
later famously leave government service to go join the efforts of the ufologists
on the other side of the aisle.

Ultimately, the Air Force concluded for the National Security Council that
“almost all sightings stemmed from one or more of three causes: mass hysteria
and hallucination; misinterpretation of known objects; or hoax.” The sightings
that couldn’t be explained this way went up the chain of command, where they
were interpreted by a few individuals who had been cleared with a need-to-

know. In the mid-1950s, this included the elite group over at the CIA working
under Todos Odarenko, analysts responsible for matching the CIA’s U-2 flights
with Air Force unknowns. But no matter how many sightings were explained as
benign, there was still the unexplained mother of all unidentified flying objects
—the nefarious crashed craft from Roswell. Everything about that flying disc
had to remain hidden from absolutely everyone but a select few. If Americans
found out about it, or about what the government had been doing in response,
there would be outrage.

For CIA analysts and Air Force personnel working together on the UFO
problem, one concern was made clear: the public was not to learn about the
government’s obsession with UFOs. These orders came from the top. Why
exactly this was the case, the rank and file did not have a need-to-know.
Underlings simply followed orders, which was why two Air Force officials from
Project Blue Book, Colonel Kirkland and Lieutenant E. J. Ruppelt, were sent to
sit on a panel at a UFO convention in California, side by side with men who
were convinced UFOs were from outer space. These men, some of the nation’s
leading ufologists, were part of a group called the Civilian Saucer Investigations
Organization of Los Angeles.

On April 2, 1952, just one week before the Life magazine UFO story hit the
newsstands, Kirkland and Ruppelt sat in a conference hall at the Mayfair Hotel
with the leading UFO hunters of the day. It was a huge media event, with people
from Time, Life, the Los Angeles Mirror, and Columbia Pictures in attendance.
The Air Force officials placated the ufologists by saying that they too were
concerned about UFOs and offering to “bring them into the loop.” In return, the
Air Force said, they would “throw” Civilian Saucer Investigations certain “cases
that might be of interest” to the organization for their review. When the scientists
pressed for security clearances so they could access top secret data, the Air Force
began to squirm. “I see no reason at all why we can’t work together,” Colonel
Kirkland said, deflecting the question. “I think it would be very foolish if we
didn’t.” Ruppelt offered up an Air Force perk: CSI members could call the
military collect.

On April 7, 1952, Life magazine published its cover story titled “There Is a
Case for Interplanetary Saucers.” The sixteen-page feature article began with the
exclusive Air Force reveal. Above the byline, it read “The Air Force is now
ready to concede that many saucer and fireball sightings still defy explanation;

here LIFE offers some scientific evidence that there is a real case for
interplanetary saucers.” The article made its case well, with the takeaway being
that UFOs really could be from out of this world. But there was a second reason
the Air Force participated in the UFO convention. The CIA’s Psychological
Strategy Board had urged the National Security Council to “monitor private
UFO groups [such] as the Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators in Los Angeles,”
and because of this, the Air Force officers had been placed at the UFO
convention in Los Angeles through backdoor recommendations at the CIA.

The CIA was particularly interested in one specific individual on the Civilian
Saucer Investigations panel, and that was a German Paperclip scientist named
Dr. Walther Riedel. Seated front and center at the UFO conference at the Mayfair
Hotel, Dr. Riedel was a study in contradiction. When Riedel smiled, a close look
revealed that he had fake front teeth—his own had been knocked out in 1945 at
the Stettin Gestapo prison in Germany. Riedel had been a prisoner there for
several weeks with fellow Peenemiinde rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, and
during the war, Riedel had served as the chief of Hitler’s V-2 missile-design
office. The American soldiers guarding Riedel at the Stettin Gestapo prison
roughed him up after Army intelligence agents passed along information stating
that in addition to designing the V-2, Dr. Riedel had been working on Hitler’s
bacteria bomb . It was in the harsh interrogation that followed that Riedel lost his
front teeth.

At the end of the war, Riedel, like Wernher Von Braun, desperately wanted to
be hired by the U.S. military so he could work on rocket programs in the United
States. Germany no longer had a military, let alone a rocket research program,
which meant Riedel was out of a job. The Russians were known to hate the
Germans; they treated their pillaged scientists like slave laborers. An offer from
the Americans was the best game in town, even if their soldiers had broken your
teeth first.

In January of 1947, Dr. Riedel became a Paperclip. His past work in chemical
rockets and bacteria bombs was whitewashed in the name of science. The caveat
for Riedel’s prosperous new life, as opposed to his possible prosecution at
Nuremberg, was that he would comply with what the U.S. military asked of him.
But Riedel’s rogue UFO-promoting behavior only a few years later illustrates
that in certain situations, the Paperclips had the upper hand. Here was Riedel at
the saucer convention, stirring up UFO hysteria. He participated in the Life
magazine article and was quoted saying that he was “completely convinced that
[UFOs] have an out-of-world basis.” If that did not engender what CIA director

Bedell Smith called hysterical thinking, what would? Riedel was not just any old
rocket scientist going on the record with America’s most popular magazine.
When asked about his profession, he told Life magazine that he was “engaged in
secret work for the U.S.”

What is publicly known about Dr. Riedel’s American career is that he had
begun at Fort Bliss, in Texas, as part of the V-2 rocket team, but after only a few
years he was mysteriously traded by the government to work as an engineer for
North American Aviation. There were rumors of “problems” with other
Paperclip scientists at White Sands Missile Range. Once Riedel was in the
private sector, he had a considerably longer leash, given that the government was
not signing his paycheck anymore. Clearly he was valuable to North American
Aviation: the company made him director of rocket-engine research. But from
the moment he left government service, Riedel was a serious thorn in the CIA’s
side. A year after the UFO conference, the CIA was still keeping close tabs on
Dr. Riedel. In early 1953, the Agency trailed Riedel to one of his lectures in Los
Angeles. There, they were shocked to learn that the Paperclip scientist and his
UFO-minded colleagues were “ going to execute a planned ‘hoax’ over the Los
Angeles area in order to test the reaction and reliability of the public in general
to unusual aerial phenomena.” Mention of a planned hoax went up the chain of
command at the CIA and set off alarms in its upper echelons . In a secret memo
dated February 9, 1953, declassified in 1993, the CIA’s director of the Office of
Scientific Intelligence expressed outrage over the company Riedel now kept. But
because he was no longer a Paperclip, there was little the CIA could do except
follow his moves and those of the men he associated with.

The CIA had also been trailing a colleague of Riedel named George P. Sutton ,
a fellow North American Aviation rocket scientist and ufologist. When Sutton
gave a lecture entitled “Rockets Behind the Iron Curtain,” the CIA was shocked
to learn that the flying saucer group seemed to know more about UFO sightings
inside the Soviet Union than the entire team of CIA agents who had been tasked
with monitoring that same information.

Ever since Bedell Smith had taken office in 1950, he’d expressed frustration
over how little information the CIA was able to get on UFO reports inside
Russia. Joseph Stalin, it appeared, kept all information about UFOs out of the
press. Between 1947 and 1952, CIA analysts monitoring the Soviet press found
only one single mention of UFOs, in an editorial column that briefly referred to
UFOs in the United States. So how did Riedel’s group know more about Soviet
UFO reports than the CIA knew?

Sufficiently concerned, the CIA instructed Riedel’s Paperclip handlers to get
him in line. His handler “suggested politely and perhaps indirectly to Dr. Riedel
that he disassociate himself from official membership on CSI.” But the obstinate
scientist refused to cease and desist. What the consequences were for Riedel
remains unclear. Whether or not Riedel and his fellow ufologist pulled off their
hoax and how he and his colleagues were able to so freely gather information
about Soviet UFOs and Soviet rockets behind the Iron Curtain is secreted away
in Riedel’s Project Paperclip file, most of which remains classified, even after
more than fifty years.

By 1957, according to the CIA monograph “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs,”
the U-2s accounted for more than half of all UFO sightings reported in the
continental United States. Odarenko had been unsuccessful in his bid to be
“relieved” of his UFO responsibilities and instead got to work creating CIA
policy regarding UFOs. He sent a secret memo to the director of the Office of
Scientific Intelligence outlining how he believed the Agency should handle
reports of UFOs :

• Keep current files on UFOs: “maintain current knowledge of sightings of
unidentified flying objects.”

• Deny that the CIA kept current files about UFOs by stating that “the project
[was] inactive.”

• Divide the explainable UFOs, meaning the U-2 flights, from the
inexplicable UFOs: “segregate references to recognizable and explainable
phenomena from those which come under the definition of 'unidentified
flying objects.’”

The Agency’s concerted effort to conceal from Congress and the public its
interest in UFOs would, in coming decades, open up a Pandora’s box and cause
credibility issues for the CIA. “The concealment of CIA interest [in UFOs]
contributed greatly to later charges of a CIA conspiracy and cover-up,” wrote
Gerald K. Haines, the historian for the National Reconnaissance Office and
someone who is often introduced as the CIA’s expert on the matter. But to get the
UFO monkey off his back, Allen Dulles began a “psychological warfare”
campaign of his own. When letters came in from concerned citizens about the
sightings, the CIA’s policy was to ignore them. When letters came in from UFO

groups, the CIA’s policy was to monitor the individuals in the group. When
letters came in from congressmen or senators, such as the one from Ohio
congressman Gordon Scherer in September of 1955, the CIA’s policy was to
have Director Dulles write a polite note explaining that UFOs were a law
enforcement problem and the CIA was specifically barred from enforcing the
law. The notes certainly portray Allen Dulles as an arrogant public servant , but
they are prized by UFO collectors, who say they prove the CIA’s sinister cover-
up of extraterrestrial UFOs. Regardless of alleged CIA policy, the public’s
fascination with UFOs proved more formidable than the CIA had ever bargained
for; average citizens simply could not get enough information about mysterious
objects streaking across the skies. And the more information they were given,
the more they wanted to know and the more questions they asked. It didn’t take
long for the public to become convinced that the CIA was covering something
up, which, of course, it was.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Need-to-Know

Everything that happens at Area 51, when it is happening, is classified as
TS/SCI, or top secret/sensitive compartmented information—an enigmatic
security policy with protocols that are also top secret . “TS/SCI classification
guides are also classified,” says Cargill Hall, historian emeritus for the National
Reconnaissance Office; this government espionage agency is so secret that even
its name was classified top secret from the time it was founded, in 1958, to its
declassification, in 1992. In 2011, most Americans still don’t know what the
NRO is or what it does, or that it is a partner organization routinely involved
with Area 51, because that is classified information.

Information classified TS/SCI ensures that outsiders don’t know what they
don’t know and insiders know only what they have a need-to-know. Winston
Churchill famously said of Russia, “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an
enigma.” The same can be said about Area 51. In the lesser-known second part
of Churchill’s phrase, he said, “But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian
national interest.” Facing a totalitarian government like the Soviet Union’s,
where secrets are easily kept, Area 51 had to mirror Soviet secrecy techniques in
order to safeguard the U-2. It was in America’s national interest to do so because
human intelligence was failing. “We obtain little significant information from
classical covert operations inside Russia,” bemoaned the president’s science
advisers in a secret 1954 national security report in which they gunned for
“science and technology to improve our intelligence take.”

They got what they wanted at Area 51. By using Soviet-style secrecy
protocols for its own operation, and putting these tactics in place out in the
Nevada desert, the CIA felt it could give its archenemy a run for its money

regarding the element of surprise. Even Air Force transport crews had no idea
where they were going when they went to the base. A classified-missions pilot
would fly to a set of coordinates over the Mojave Desert and contact a certain
UHF frequency called Sage Control . There, a voice at the other end of the radio
would deliver increasingly more specific coordinates, ending with a go-ahead to
land at a spot nestled inside a circle of mountains where no airstrip was supposed
to exist. Only when the aircraft was a few hundred feet off the ground would
runway lights flash on.

CIA pilots were kept equally in the dark. Carefully culled from Strategic Air
Command bases at Turner Air Force Base, in Georgia, and Bergstrom Air Force
Base, in Texas, the men had no idea who they were going to be working for
when they signed on. In retrospect it seems easy to recognize the hand of the
CIA, but this was not the case in late 1955 when the Agency was just seven
years old. “It was like something out of fiction.” Hervey Stockman recalls. “I
was given a date and told to be at Room 215 at the Austin Hotel and knock on
that door at exactly 3:15. So I went down there at the appointed time and
knocked on the door. An extremely good-looking guy in a beautiful tweed
opened it and said, ‘Come on in, Hervey...’ That was my first introduction to the
Agency.”

Hervey Stockman was one of America’s most accomplished pilots. He was as
fearless as he was gentle, a man who fell in love with airplanes the first time he
flew one for the Army Air Corps, shortly after leaving the comforts of Princeton
University to fight the Nazis in the Second World War. By the time he arrived at
Area 51 for training, part of the first group of seven U-2 fliers called Detachment
A, he had already flown 168 combat missions in two wars, World War II and
Korea.

Area 51 “was the boonies,” Stockman says. “We lived in trailers, three to a
trailer as I recall. We couldn’t write or call home from out there at Groom Fake.”
When Stockman’s group arrived in January of 1956, there were “probably fifty
or so people on the site.” The trailers were in walking distance from the hangars,
and “there was a training building, which was also a trailer,” right next door,
which was where Stockman spent most of his time. He remembers the mess hall
as being one of the only permanent structures besides the hangars on base. “It
was just all desert out there,” Stockman remembers. On occasion, wild horses
roamed onto the lake bed looking for water or food. “To get to civilization you
were pretty dependent on aircraft. There was some road traffic but it was very
carefully watched. Security people everywhere.”

The identities of the pilots were equally concealed . “We all had pseudonyms.
Mine was Sampson... I hated the name Sampson so I asked, Can I use the name
Sterritt? I said, ‘Sterritt fits me better. I’m a little guy and Sterritt is more my
speed.’ They said, Teel free. If you want to be Sterritt, you’re Sterritt.’ But for
their record keeping I was Sampson. The records are still there... in the
basement. And they’re under the name Sampson. The Agency was very smart
about all of that.” The pilots were watched during their time off, not so much to
see what the men might be up to as to make sure KGB agents were not watching
them. Detachment A pilots were given apartments in Hollywood, California,
where they officially lived. During weekends they socialized at the Brown Derby
Restaurant. “It was a gathering spot and the security people could keep an eye on
us there,” Stockman explains. Come Monday morning, when it was time to
return to Area 51, the Derby was the rendezvous spot because “it was one of the
few places that was always open at five a.m.” The majority of the Derby
clientele had been up all night; the six very physically fit, clear-eyed pilots with
their Air Force haircuts, accompanied by two CIA handlers in sport jackets and
bow ties, must have been a sight to behold. From there, the group drove the
Cahuenga Pass through the Hollywood Hills to the Burbank airport, where they
boarded a Lockheed airplane headed for the secret base. “At the time, we did not
know of Lockheed’s involvement in the program,” Stockman explains. “Even
that was concealed from us. We were called ‘drivers.’ There were a lot of reasons
for it. At the time, I don’t think any of us really understood why, but that’s
essentially what we were. We were just, by God, drivers. We were not glory
boys.” The drivers did not have a need-to-know about anything except how to
fly the airplane. Stockman once asked his superiors what the policy would be if
he were shot down and captured. “Effectively, we were told that if we were
captured and we were pressed by our captors, we could tell them anything and
everything. Because of our lowly position as ‘drivers’ we didn’t know very
much.” He said that during training even the name “Groom Lake was not part of
our lexicon.”

Across the world, the Russians were busy working on their own form of
espionage. If Area 51 had a Communist doppelganger, it was a remote top secret
facility forty miles northeast of Moscow called NII-88 . There, a rocket scientist
named Sergei Korolev—the Soviet Union’s own Wernher Von Braun—was
working on a project that would soon shame American military science and

propel the arms and space race into a sprint. Fearing the CIA would assassinate
Russia’s key rocket scientist, Stalin declared Sergei Korolev’s name a state
secret , which it remained until his death, in 1966. Sergei Korolev was only
referred to as Chief Designer, not unlike the way Richard Bissell was known to
employees outside the CIA only as Mr. B. Just as insiders called Area 51 the
Ranch, NII-88 was known to its scientists as the Bureau. Like Area 51, NII-88
did not exist on the map. Before the Communist Revolution, NII-88 had been a
small village called Podlipki, same as the Groom Lake area had once been a
little mining enclave called Groom Mine. Both facilities began as outcroppings
of tents and warehouses, accessible only to a short list of government elite. Both
facilities would develop into multimillion-dollar establishments where
multibillion-dollar espionage platforms would be built and tested, each having
the singular purpose of outperforming what was being built on the other side.

In 1956, all the CIA knew of NII-88 was that it was the place where Russia
kept dozens of its captured German scientists toiling away on secret science
projects. These men were Russia’s version of America’s Paperclip scientists , and
they included the four hundred German rocket scientists who’d been plied with
alcohol and then seized in the middle of the night—just as former Messerschmitt
pilot Fritz Wendel had said.

The CIA first learned about NII-88’s existence in late 1955, when the Soviets
decided they had milked their former Third Reich scientists for all they were
worth and began sending them back home. When the CIA learned of Russia’s
repatriation program, the Agency leaped at the intelligence opportunity and
initiated a program called Operation Dragon Return . CIA officers were
dispatched to Germany to hunt down the scientists who had been working in
Russia, and the information gleaned from the returnees was considerable. It
included technical data on Russian advances in radio technology, electronics,
and armaments design. But to the CIA’s great frustration, when it came to NII-
88, the repatriated German scientists claimed to have no clear idea about what
was really going on there. It seemed that NII-88, like Area 51, worked with strict
need-to-know protocols, and the German scientists hadn’t been cleared with a
need-to-know. All the Germans could tell the CIA agents debriefing them was
that Moscow’s top scientists and engineers were developing something there that
was highly classified. Unlike in America, where German rocket scientists were
put in charge of America’s most classified missile program at White Sands
Missile Range, German scientists in Russia had been relegated to the second tier.
With no hard facts about the extraordinary technological enterprise that was

under way at NII-88, the CIA was left guessing. The speculation was that the
Russians were developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, that
could reach the United States by traveling over the top of the world.

The missile threat needed to be addressed, and fast. By 1956 Americans were
constantly being reminded about this foreboding Red menace by the media. A
January 1956 issue of Time magazine made Soviet missile technology its big
story. The cover featured a drawing of an anthropomorphic rocket, complete
with eyeballs and a brain, carrying a nuclear bomb and bearing down on a major
U.S. city. The magazine’s analysts declared that in a little more than five years,
Russians would be winning the arms race. The editors went so far as to
prophesize a nuclear strike on the Pacific Ocean that would send a “cloud of
radioactive death drift[ing] downwind” over America. Making the threat seem
worse was the fact that there was no end to the confidence and bravado projected
by the Soviet premier. “We’re making missiles like sausages,” Nikita
Khrushchev declared on TV. If Russia succeeded in making these ICBMs, as
was feared, then Russia really could place a nuclear warhead in the missile’s
nose and strike anywhere in the United States. “I am quite sure that we shall
have very soon a guided missile with a hydrogen-bomb warhead which would
hit any point in the world,” Khrushchev boasted shortly after the Time magazine
article appeared.

While the Soviets were concentrating efforts on advancing missile
technology, the powerful General LeMay had convinced the Joint Chiefs of Staff
that long-range bombers were a far better way for America to go to war. LeMay
was not shy about expressing his disdain for missiles; he brazenly opposed them.
LeMay’s top research-and-development commander, General Thomas S. Power,
told Pentagon officials that missiles “cannot cope with contingencies” the way
bomber pilots could. Another one of LeMay’s generals, Clarence S. Irvine,
stated, “I don’t know how you show... teeth with a missile.” While the Joint
Chiefs were deciding whether it was better to build up America’s arsenal with
missiles or bombers, the nuclear warheads continued to roll off the production
lines at Sandia, in New Mexico, with astonishing speed. Ten years earlier, in
1946, the U.S. nuclear stockpile had totaled two. In 1955, that stockpile had
risen to 2,280 nuclear bombs. The reason for LeMay’s opposition to the missile
programs was obvious: if the Pentagon started pumping more money into
missiles that could carry nuclear warheads, LeMay’s bombers would lose
importance. As it was, he was already losing money and men to the overhead
reconnaissance nonsense being spearheaded by the CIA’s Richard Bissell over at

Area 51.

In early 1956, the Air Force retaliated against Khrushchev’s war of words
with the kind of response General Curtis LeMay knew best: threat, intimidation,
and force. LeMay scrambled nearly a thousand B-47 bombers in a simulated
attack on Russia using bomber planes that were capable of carrying nuclear
bombs. Air Force pilots took off from air bases in Alaska and Greenland,
charged over the Arctic, and flew to the very edge of Soviet borders before U-
turning and racing home. This must have been a terrifying experience for the
Soviets, who had no idea that LeMay’s bombers were planning on turning
around. Further provoking them, on March 21, 1956, LeMay’s bomber pilots
began flying top secret missions as part of Operation Home Run , classified until
2001. From Thule Air Force Base in Greenland, LeMay sent modified versions
of America’s fastest bomber, the B-47, over the Arctic Circle and into Russia’s
Siberian tundra to spy. The purpose was to probe for electronic intelligence, or
ELINT, seeing how Soviet radar worked by forcing Soviet radars to turn on.
Once the Soviets started tracking LeMay’s bombers, technicians gathered the
ELINT to decipher back home. Asked later about these dangerous provocations,
LeMay remarked, “With a bit more luck, we could have started World War III.”

Sam Pizzo worked as a navigator during the SAC espionage operation,
planning flights over nuclear facilities, missile sites, naval installations, and
radar sites. The 156 missions took place from March 21 to May 10, 1956, where
the Russian landscape meets the Arctic Ocean, which made for total darkness
twenty-four hours a day. The temperature outside varied between -35 degrees
and -70 degrees Fahrenheit. Sam Pizzo recalls those Cold War missions:
“Ambarchik, Tiksi, Novaya Zemlya, these were the territories we covered. This
was the real deal. Our missions were not twelve miles off the coastline, to study
electromagnetic wave propagation [as was reported]. We went in.” An
undetermined number of pilots were shot down. Several were believed to have
survived their bailouts, only to be taken prisoner and thrown into the Russian
gulags. Everyone knew that suffering a gulag imprisonment was a fate worse
than death. The missions were so top secret, Pizzo explained, that very few
people at Thule had any idea where the pilots were flying. As a navigator, Pizzo
was among the elite group who charted the pilots’ paths. Flying over the Arctic
required a very specific expertise in navigation, a different skill set than was
used anywhere else on the globe. At the top of the world, the magnetic field
fluctuates radically, which means compasses simply do not work. Instead,
navigators like Sam Pizzo used celestial shots of the North Star and drew maps

accordingly. This was a skill that Pizzo would later use when he was recruited
for work at Area 51.

As Operation Home Run continued, the CIA worried that General FeMay’s
aggressive missions were a national security threat. “ Soviet leaders may have
become convinced that the U.S. actually has intentions of military aggression in
the near future,” a nervous CIA panel warned the president in the winter of 1956.
And President Eisenhower’s science advisers told him that flying U-2s over
Russia could not wait. The Agency’s Russian nuclear weapons expert Herbert
Miller, the man who accompanied Bissell on that first scouting trip to Area 51,
explained that no other program “can so quickly bring so much vital information
at so little risk and so little cost.”

The CIA planned to have the first U-2 flights photograph the facilities where
the Agency believed Russia was building its bombers, missiles, nuclear
warheads, and surface-to-air missiles. And the U-2 pilots would seek out the
location of the elusive facility called NII-88. Having completed pilot training at
Area 51, four pilot detachments were ready to go, fully prepared to penetrate
deep into denied Soviet territory. There, they would be able to photograph half of
the Soviet Union’s 6.5-million-square-mile landmass. But it had to happen fast.

President Eisenhower was gravely concerned . “I fear if one of these planes
gets shot down [we run] the risk of starting a nuclear war,” he wrote in his White
House journal. Richard Bissell promised the president that there was no chance
of shooting down the U-2 and very little chance of tracking it. Besides, if the U-
2 did get shot down, Bissell said, it would most likely disintegrate on impact
with the ground, killing the pilot and destroying the airplane.

The Moscow air show on June 24, 1956, foreshadowed the breaking of promises
made to the president. In a show of ceremony, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev
invited air force generals from twenty-eight foreign delegations, including
General Nathan Twining, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff. For all the fanfare and
bravado of the bombers and fighter jets sweeping across the skies, the more
significant event occurred a few hours later, at a wooden picnic table in Gorky
Park. There, General Twining and the leaders of the British and French
delegations sat and listened to Khrushchev deliver a long-winded speech.
Partway through, the Soviet premier raised his vodka glass and made a toast “in
defense of peace.” Years later, retired Russian colonel Alexander Orlov related
what happened next: “In the midst of his toast [Khrushchev] turned to General

Twining and said, ‘Today we showed you our aircraft. But would you like a look
at our missiles?”’ Shocked by the offer, General Twining said, “Yes.”
Khrushchev shot back, “First show us your aircraft and stop sending intruders
into our airspace.” Khrushchev was referring to the bombers sent over the Arctic
Circle by General LeMay. “ We will shoot down uninvited guests . We will get all
of your [airplanes]. They are flying coffins!”

It was a terribly awkward moment underscored by the mercurial Soviet
leader’s abrupt shift in tone, from applauding peace to talking about shooting
down American airplanes. General Twining had been set up for a confrontation.
Things got worse when Khrushchev looked around the picnic table for reactions
and saw a U.S. military attache pouring his drink under a bush. “Here I am
speaking about peace and friendship, but what does your military attache do?”
Khrushchev shouted at Ambassador Charles Bohlen, then demanded that the
attache drink a penalty toast. Once the man had swallowed his vodka, he got up
and quickly left the picnic. If Khrushchev thought the Americans were trying to
insult him in the park, he would be even more enraged two weeks later when he
learned the CIA had sent a U-2 directly over the Kremlin to take photographs of
the house in which Nikita Khrushchev slept.

Area 51 had a Washington, DC, complement for the U-2 program, an office on
the fifth floor of an unmarked CIA facility at 1717 H Street. This served as the
command center for Project Aquatone’s first, secret missions over the Soviet
Union. It was from this clandestine facility that, shortly before midnight on July
3, 1956, Richard Bissell made a historic telephone call over a secure line. He
reached the U-2’s secret base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, and gave the
commander the authorization to proceed. There, in a nearby room, Hervey
Stockman sat breathing pure oxygen from a ventilator as a flight surgeon
monitored the levels of nitrogen in his blood. Outside the door, CIA men armed
with machine guns stood guard. Given the time difference, where Stockman was
sitting it was already the following morning, making it the anniversary of
America’s independence. The nation was 180 years old. If all went well,
Stockman was about to become the first pilot to penetrate the Iron Curtain’s
airspace. He would fly all the way to Leningrad, around the coast, and back
down, putting him forever in the record books as the first man to fly over the
Soviet Union in a U-2.

Stockman and his U-2 took off from Wiesbaden a little after 6:00 a.m., the

pilot and his airplane moving skyward in a dramatic incline. The U-2 rose at a
remarkable fifteen thousand feet a minute, so steep a gradient that for airmen on
the ground who were unfamiliar with the airplane, it must have looked like
Stockman was about to pitch back and stall. Halfway to altitude, Stockman
briefly let the fuselage even out, allowing his body fluids and the fluids in the
fuel tanks to expand and adjust. Once, a U-2 pilot had ascended too quickly, and
his fuel tanks exploded. The pilot was killed. After a few additional minutes of
ascent, Stockman arrived at cruising altitude. The sky above him was black and
he could see stars. Below him, the Earth curved. It would be an eight-and-a-half-
hour journey without a sip of water or a bite of food. In the U-2’s camera bay,
Stockman transported a five-hundred-pound Hycon camera fitted with the most
advanced photo lenses ever devised in America. To prove how accurate the
camera was, Bissell had sent a U-2 from Groom Lake on a flight over President
Eisenhower’s Pennsylvania farm. From thirteen and a half miles up, the U-2’s
cameras were able to take clear photographs of Eisenhower’s cows as they drank
water from troughs.

After several hours, Stockman approached Russia’s submarine city . “I was
supposed to turn the cameras on when I reached Leningrad,” Stockman recalls.

“I was to fly along photographing the naval installations there as well as a couple
of airfields that were all part of what we had been led to believe might hold long-
range Soviet bombers.” But there were no long-range bombers to be found. The
famous bomber gap, it turned out, was false. What Stockman filmed on the first
overflight into Russia provided the CIA with critical facts on an issue that had
previously been the subject of contentious debate. Russian weapons expert
Herbert Miller wrote a triumphant memo to Eisenhower after the film in
Stockman’s camera was interpreted, explaining just how many “new discoveries
have come to light.” Stockman’s flight provided the Agency with four hundred
thousand square miles of coverage. “Many new airfields previously unknown,
industrial complexes of a size heretofore unsuspected were revealed... Fighter
aircraft at the five most important bases covered were drawn up in orderly rows
as if for formal inspection on parade.” What astonished Miller was just how
current the information was. “We know that the guns in the anti-aircraft batteries
sighted were in a horizontal position rather than pointed upwards and ‘on the
ready.’ We know that some harvests were being brought in, and that the small
truck gardens were being worked.” They denoted “real intentions, objectives and
qualities of the Soviet Union.” Hervey Stockman explains it this way: “What it
portrayed was that as a people they were not all geared up to go to war. They

were leading a normal Russian life, so that behind this ‘Iron Curtain’ there
wasn’t all this beating of drums and movement of tanks and everything that was
envisioned. They were going about their way over there.”

Stockman’s photos made the CIA ecstatic and justified the entire U-2
program, as a flurry of top secret memos dated July 17, 1956, revealed. “For the
first time we are really able to say that we have an understanding of what was
going on in the Soviet Union, on July 4, 1956,” Miller wrote. But as beneficial
as Stockman’s flight was for the CIA, the results proved disastrous for President
Eisenhower’s relationship with Nikita Khrushchev. Despite Bissell’s assurances
to the contrary, the U-2s were tracked by the Soviets’ air-defense warning
systems from the moment they hit the radar screens. Once the film from
Stockman’s flight was developed, CIA photo interpreters determined that the
Soviets had attempted more than twenty interceptions of Stockman’s mission.
“MiG-17 and MiG-19 fighters were photographed desperately trying to reach the
U-2, only to have to fall back to an altitude where the air was dense enough for
them to restart their flamed-out, oxygen-starved engines,” photo interpreter Dino
Brugioni told Azr and Space magazine after the U-2 program was declassified, in
1998.

When Khrushchev learned the Americans had betrayed him, he was furious.
After the picnic at Gorky Park, Khrushchev had agreed to spend the Fourth of
July at Spaso House, the official residence of Ambassador Charles Bohlen,
located just down the street from the Kremlin. When Khrushchev learned that
while he had been celebrating the American Independence Day with the
country’s ambassador, a U-2 had been soaring over Russia, he was humiliated.
“The Americans [are] chortling over our impotence,” Khrushchev told his son.
Sergei , a twenty-one-year-old aspiring missile designer. But in addition to the
personal affront they caused Khrushchev, the U-2 overflights greatly
embarrassed the Soviet Union’s military machine. Soviet MiG fighter jets
couldn’t get a shot anywhere near Hervey Stockman’s U-2, which flew miles
above the MiG performance ceiling, just as Colonel Leghorn had predicted. In
1956, the land-based Soviet surface-to-air missiles could not get a shot up high
enough to knock the airplane out of the sky. America’s spy plane had flown over
Russia with impunity. And if that fact became known, the Soviet Union would
look weak.

Weighing the options—embarrass his own military, embarrass the American
president, or say nothing—Khrushchev chose to remain silent, at least as far as
the international press was concerned. As a result, the first U-2 overflights were

kept secret between the two governments. But they seriously strained already
tenuous relations. Eisenhower ordered the CIA to stop all overflights inside the
Soviet Union until further notice. Even worse, the president told Richard Bissell
that he had “lost enthusiasm” for the CIA’s aerial espionage program .

Back at Area 51, Bissell had a lot to worry about. Concerned that his U-2
program was going to be canceled by the president, he hired a team to analyze
the probability of a Soviet shoot-down of the U-2. The news was grim: the
Soviets were advancing their surface-to-air missile technology so rapidly that in
ah likelihood, within eighteen months they would be able to get their SA-2
missile up to seventy thousand feet. Bissell decided that the only way to keep his
program aloft was to hide the U-2 from Soviet radar by inventing some kind of
radar-absorbing paint. Bissell shared his idea with Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson,
who told him that painting the U-2 was a bad idea . Paint was heavy, and the U-2
flew so high because of how light it was, Johnson explained. The weight that
paint would add to the aircraft would result in a loss of fifteen hundred feet of
altitude. Bissell didn’t want to hear that. So he went to the president’s scientific
adviser James Killian and asked him to put together a group of scientists who
could make the CIA some radar-absorbing paint. These scientists, who worked
out of Harvard University and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and were called the
Boston Group, told Bissell they could get him what he wanted. It was a radical
idea that had never been tested before. The scientists and engineers at MIT
prided themselves on meeting challenges that other scientists believed were
impossible.

There was a second serious problem facing Richard Bissell in the summer of
1956 and that was General LeMay. Impressed with the spy plane’s performance,
LeMay was now angling for control of the airplane. Under a program called
Project Dragon Lady, LeMay ordered a fleet of thirty-one U-2s specifically for
the Air Lorce. To keep the program secret from Congress, the Air Lorce
transferred money over to the CIA , which meant that while working to head off
LeMay’s usurpation, Bissell simultaneously had to act as the go-between
between the Air Lorce and Lockheed for the slightly modified U-2s. With these
new Air Lorce airplanes came a demand for more “drivers,” which meant the
arrival of two new groups of pilots at Area 51—those picked for CIA missions
and others chosen for Air Lorce ones. Among those selected for Air Lorce
missions was Anthony “Tony” Bevacqua.

“I may have been the only U-2 pilot at Area 51 who never made a model
airplane as a kid,” Bevacqua recalls. Instead, he had spent all his time devouring
books. His obsessive reading of paperbacks, usually those by Zane Grey or Erie
Gardner, helped offset his fear that he be unable to read English, like his father.
The son of Sicilian immigrants, Bevacqua was the youngest pilot to fly the U-2
at Groom Lake, which he did in the winter of 1957 at the age of twenty-four. But
before the handsome, vibrant Bevacqua wound up at the CIA’s secret base, he
was the roommate of another dashing young pilot whose name would soon
become known around the world.

Before the two fighter pilots arrived at Area 51 to fly the U-2, Bevacqua and
Francis Gary Powers were a couple of type A pilots with the 508th Strategic
Fighter Wing at Turner Air Force Base in Georgia. They lived in a rented four-
bedroom house situated two miles from the main gate. Both had been flying F-
84 fighter jets for almost two years when one day Powers, whom everybody
called Frank, just up and disappeared. “There were rumors that Frank had gone
off on some kind of secret program,” Bevacqua says, “but this was just talk, not
something you could really sink your teeth into.” A few months later Bevacqua
was approached by a squadron leader and asked if he wanted to volunteer for “an
interesting flight program.”

“About what?” Bevacqua asked. The recruiter said he could not say, only that
it would involve flying and that Bevacqua would have to leave the Air Force but
could later return. The program, he was told, needed “a volunteer.” It was
important, the recruiter said, a mysterious edge to his voice. Bevacqua signed on.

He was flown to the Berger Brothers Company, located in a nondescript
building in New Haven, Connecticut, not far from Yale University, that was
filled with seamstresses making girdles and bras. What was he doing in there? he
wondered. He was led through the workstations and into a back room. The
unlikely supplier had a perfect cover for CIA-contract work: making ladies’
underwear. In reality, the company, later renamed the David Clark Company, had
already proven itself thousands of times over. During World War II, it made
parachutes for U.S. Army Air Forces and Navy pilots.

In a clandestine back room, behind the brassiere assembly lines, Tony
Bevacqua was fitted for a high-altitude flight suit specifically tailored for his
physique. For the duration of his contract, Bevacqua would be required to
maintain his weight within ounces. An ill-fitting suit could mean death for a pilot
and the inevitable loss of an airplane. Bevacqua understood the concept of need-
to-know and was aware that it prohibited him from asking any questions about

what the suit was for. But he knew enough about partial-pressure suits to realize
that whatever aircraft he was going to be piloting was going to be flying very
high indeed.

His next stop was Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for a battery of physical
and psychological procedures. There, Bevacqua underwent a series of endurance
tests. Some were familiar but others he found thought-provokingly strange. All
U-2 pilots were put into the high-altitude chamber to simulate the experience of
sitting in a cockpit in a flight suit that your life depended on. At 63,000 feet,
blood boils because there is not enough pressure to sustain oxygen in the
bloodstream. There was another test called the Furnace in which U-2 pilots were
left in a room that was significantly hotter than a hot sauna. Bevacqua was
spared that one but he did have liquids pumped into his every orifice, first water
and then some kind of mineral oil. Many U-2 pilots were hooked up to odd
machines and others were given electroshock. Bevacqua got what he called the
dreaded corpse test instead. He recalled how he “was put in a small space, my
arms crossed over my chest like I was in a casket at a morgue. It was absolutely
impossible for me to move my extremities. I was told to hyperventilate for as
long as I could.”

Bevacqua surmised that he would be chosen for the prestigious, top secret
assignment only if he was able to pass every test. He wanted the job badly and
was entirely willing to push himself physically to the edge. “I came within a
breath of passing out during the corpse test,” he explains. “After they said I
could breathe, the attendants then pulled at my arms and legs but there was no
way they could move or bend my extremities. As I breathed oxygen back into
my body my cheeks loosened and then the rest of my body gradually returned to
normal.” After a few minutes Bevacqua’s vital signs stabilized. “Apparently, this
test was to see if I would have a seizure,” he explains.

The next test was a freezing experiment . “I was asked to put my arms in a
bucket of ice for as long as I could stand it. I don’t remember what happened
exactly. Probably good that I don’t. I remember that I felt like a guinea pig.”
Unknown to Bevacqua or the rest of America, the division of the aviation
medicine school at Wright-Patterson that was responsible for testing the U-2
pilots was run by Project Paperclip doctors, doctors with controversial histories.
The Air Force had been willing to turn a blind eye to the scientists’ past work in
order to get where it wanted to go in the future, which was the upper atmosphere
and outer space. The work that these Paperclip doctors had done during the war
would later become a shameful stain on the Air Force record.

In 1980, journalist Linda Hunt published an article in the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists revealing publicly for the first time that several of the nation’s
leading German American aerospace doctors had previously worked at Nazi
concentration camps . There, they had obtained aviation medicine data by
conducting barbaric experiments on thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and
other people considered disposable. Many newspaper articles and medical papers
followed, documenting how Project Paperclip came to be and raising important
questions about how much the government had known about the scientists’
sordid pasts. The issues were well reported but often ignored by the public
because of the heinous subject matter involved. The idea that the American
military and its intelligence agents would overlook war crimes and crimes
against humanity in the name of advancing American science was, and continues
to be, an odious one. It is likely that this is the reason why the federal
government has never fully declassified the Operation Paperclip files. In 1999, a
government panel released 126,000 pages of previously classified documents on
former German Paperclips, but the panel also revealed that there were over six
hundred million still-classified pages waiting “for review.” No significant release
has occured since.

In March of 1957, Bevacqua finally passed his tests and arrived at Area 51,
where the living conditions had improved. The canvas tents had been upgraded
to Quonset huts. There were working showers. The mess hah had been
expanded, and someone had built a makeshift bar. But the protocols for flying
were as undeveloped as they’d been when Ray Goudey and others were first
figuring out how to get the U-2 to fly high. The training that Tony Bevacqua
experienced at Area 51 was unlike anything he had ever seen on an Air Force
base. The CIA method to train pilots on the U-2 was as radical and as
unorthodox as an Air Force pilot could imagine. At Turner Air Force Base,
Bevacqua had learned to fly F-84s the Air Force way. That meant first diligently
studying the aircraft manuals, then practicing in a flight simulator, then
practicing in a trainer, and finally going up in the airplane with an instructor. At
Area 51, there was no manual for the U-2, no flight simulator, no trainer, and no
instructor. “The original U-2s had only one seat and one engine, which meant the
CIA instructor pilot gave you a lesson with your feet on the ground,” Bevacqua
explains. Flying this strange and secret spy plane came without a morsel of
bureaucracy, never mind basic rules, making the overall experience profound.
“You were basically given a talk by an instructor pilot. Then you were given a
piece of cardboard with a checklist on the front side, and fuel and oxygen graphs

on the back. Then it was time to fly. And that was that.”

Coupled with the secrecy protocols, the experience for pilots at Area 51
verged on sublime. No one but his old roommate from Turner AFB, Francis
Gary Powers, knew who Tony Bevacqua really was. At Area 51 he went by only
a pilot number and his first name. His family members had no idea where he
was, nor would they find out about his secret missions for decades to come. As
for future assignments, very few people were told where Air Force pilots were
headed in the U-2—including the pilots themselves. What everyone knew was
that pilots who got shot down over enemy territory were almost always tortured
for information. This meant that the less you knew as a pilot, the better it was for
everyone involved.

Bevacqua couldn’t wait for an assignment. For this small group of pilots—
only 25 percent of candidates passed the physical tests—a U-2 mission carried
with it a sacred sense of national pride. Tony Bevacqua was living the American
dream and protecting it at the same time. He was not someone who ever forgot
for a moment how lucky he was. “Always make the most of your opportunities,”
Bevacqua’s Italian-speaking father had told him as a child. Tony Bevacqua had
done just that. He couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity. He was one of
America’s most important spy plane pilots. He was helping to save the free
world.

By the winter of 1957, the Boston Group had completed what Richard Bissell
wanted in radar-absorbing paint. Bissell received the paint and gave it to
Lockheed engineers at Area 51. He asked them to coat the fuselage of several U-
2s with it, which they did. Bissell understood that Kelly Johnson disapproved of
the radar-absorbing-paint program, which he said made his U-2s “dirty birds.”
But Bissell was under too much presidential pressure to deal with the watchful
eye of Kelly Johnson at this point. To measure how the dirty birds performed
against radar, Bissell hired a different company to measure the radar returns, the
defense contractor EG&G.

EG&G is an enigma in its own right. Beginning in 1947, EG&G was the
most powerful defense contractor in the nation that no one had ever heard of. In
many ways, this still remains the case in 2011. The early anonymity was
intended. It was cultivated to help make secret-keeping easier. Originally called
Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, EG&G had once been a small engineering
company run by three MIT professors. In 1927, Dr. Harold “Doc” Edgerton

invented stop-motion photography, which utilized another of his patented
inventions, the strobe light. Edgerton’s famous stop-motion photographs include
one of a bullet passing though an apple, a drop of water splashing on a
countertop, and a hummingbird frozen in flight. Edgerton was fond of saying
that his career began because he wanted to make time stand still. EG&G got its
first known set of defense contracts during World War II, when Doc Edgerton’s
strobe lights and photographer’s flashbulb were used to light up the ground
during nighttime aerial reconnaissance missions, rendering the age-old flare
obsolete. Thanks to Doc Edgerton, fliers like Colonel Richard Leghorn were
able to photograph Normandy before D-day.

Kenneth J. Germeshausen worked in high-energy pulse theory at MIT. He
held more than fifty patents, including a number in radar. Together with the
company’s third partner, Herbert Grier, Germeshausen developed the firing
system for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs. The Manhattan Project
contracts came to the three professors because of their affiliation with Vannevar
Bush, the former dean of engineering at MIT and later the man in charge of the
Manhattan Project.

In addition to the firing systems on the nuclear bombs, which were based on
a simple signal-switching relay system called the DN-11 relay, EG&G handled
the defense contract to take millions of stop-motion photographs of nuclear
bomb explosions in the Pacific and at the Nevada Test Site. It was from these
photographs, and from these photographs only, that EG&G scientists could
determine for the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense
the exact yield, or power, of an exploded nuclear bomb. For decades a great
majority of the most highly classified engineering jobs related to nuclear
weapons testing went to EG&G. In the 1960s, when special engineering teams
were needed to clean up deadly radioactive waste that was the result of these
nuclear tests, the contracts went to EG&G as well. They were trusted implicitly,
and EG&G’s operations were quintessential black. They also had other
businesses, such as radar testing. In the early 1950s, EG&G ran a radar-testing
facility approximately thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. Very little
information is known about that period or about what EG&G was working on, as
the data remains classified in EG&G’s unique Restricted Data files. At Bissell’s
behest, in 1957 EG&G agreed to set up a radar range on the outskirts of Area 51
to measure radar returns for the dirty-bird project. In a CIA monograph about the
U-2, declassified in 1998, the EG&G tracking station just outside Groom Lake is
alleged to be “little more than a series of radar sets and a trailer containing

instrumentation” where engineers could record data and analyze results. And yet
the exact location of this “small testing facility” has been redacted from the
otherwise declassified U-2 record. Why? The key term is EG&G. Giving away
too much information about EG&G could inadvertently open a can of worms.

No one but an elite has a need-to-know where any exterior EG&G facilities are
located at Area 51—specifically, whether they are located outside the blueprint
of the base.

And so, in April of 1957, with EG&G radar specialists tracking his aircraft’s
radar returns, Lockheed test pilot Robert Sieker took one of the newly painted U-
2s to the skies over Groom Lake. His orders were to see how high he could get
the dirty bird to climb. Sieker took off from Area 51 and flew for almost ninety
miles without incident when suddenly, in a valley near Pioche, the Boston
Group’s paint caused the airplane to overheat, spin out of control, and crash.
Sieker was able to eject but was killed when a piece of the spinning aircraft hit
him in the head. Kelly Johnson was right. It was a bad idea to try to retrofit the
U-2. CIA search teams took four days to locate Sieker’s body and the wreckage
of the plane. The crash had attracted the watchful eye of the press, and the U-2’s
cover story, that it was a weather research plane, wore thin. Halfway across the
country, a headline at the Chicago Daily Tribune read “Secrecy Veils High-
Altitude Research Jet; Lockheed U-2 Called Super Snooper.”

A pilot was dead, and the camouflage paint had made the U-2 more
dangerous, not more stealthy. Bissell knew he needed to act fast. He was losing
control of the U-2 spy plane program and everything he had created at Area 51.
His next idea, part genius and part hubris, was to petition the president for an
entirely new spy plane. The CIA needed a better, faster, more technologically
advanced aircraft that would break scientific barriers and trick Soviet radars into
thinking it wasn’t there. This new spy plane Bissell had in mind would fly higher
than ninety thousand feet and have stealth features built in from pencil to plane.
Bissell was taking a major gamble with his billion-dollar request. Bringing an
entirely new black budget spy plane program to the president’s attention at a
time when the president was upset with the results of the previous work done at
Area 51 was either madness or brilliance, depending on one’s point of view. But
just as Richard Bissell began presenting plans for his radical and ambitious new
project to the president, a national security crisis overwhelmed the country. On
October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched the world’s first satellite, a 184-pound
silver orb called Sputnik 1. This was the secret that Sergei Korolev had been
working on at Area 51’s Communist doppelganger, NII-88.

At first, the White House tried to downplay the fact that the Soviets had beat
the Americans into space. Eisenhower, at his country home in Pennsylvania for
the weekend, didn’t immediately comment on the event. But the following
morning, the New York Times ran a headline of half-inch-high capital letters
across all six columns, a spot historically reserved for the declarations of war.

SOVIET FIRES EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE; IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000

MPH; SPHERE TRACKED IN 4 CROSSINGS OVER U.S.

A satellite launch meant the Russians now had a rocket with enough
propulsion and guidance to hit a target anywhere in the world. So much for the
Paperclips Wernher Von Braun and Ernst Steinhoff being the most competent
rocket scientists in the world. “ As it beeped in the sky . Sputnik 1 created a crisis
of confidence that swept the country like a windblown forest fire,” Eisenhower’s
science adviser James Killian later recalled. British reporters at the Guardian
warned, “We must be prepared to be told [by Russia] what the other side of the
moon looks like.” French journalists homed in on America’s “disillusion and
bitterfness]” at the crushing space-race defeat. The French underscored
America’s scientific shame. “The Americans have little experience with
humiliation in the technical domain,” read the article in Le Figaro. Because
members of the public had no idea about the CIA’s U-2 spy plane program, they
believed that with Sputnik, the Russians could now learn all of America’s
secrets, while America remained in the dark about theirs. For twenty-one days,
Sputnik circled the Earth at a speed of 18,000 mph until its radio signal finally
faded and died.

In deciding the best course of action, the president turned back to his science
advisers. In the month following Sputnik, a new position was created for James
Killian—special assistant to the president for science and technology—and for
the next two years Killian would meet with the president almost every day. This
became a defining moment for Richard Bissell. For as depressing as his Area 51
prospects had seemed only a month before, the news of Sputnik was, ironically
for the CIA, a harbinger of good news. James Killian adored Richard Bissell;
they’d been friends for over a decade. Immediately after the Russians launched
Sputnik, Killian and Bissell found themselves working closely together again.
Only this time, they weren’t teaching economics to university students. The two
men would work hand in glove to launch America’s most formidable top secret
billion-dollar spy plane , to be built and test-flown at Area 51. Advancing science

and technology for military purposes was now at the very top of the president’s
list of priorities. With James Killian on his side, Bissell inadvertently found
himself in the extraordinary position of getting almost whatever he wanted from
the president of the United States. And as long as what Richard Bissell built at
Area 51 could humiliate the Russians and show them who was boss, this
included a bottomless budget, infinite manpower, total secrecy, and ultimate
control.

CHAPTER SIX

Atomic Accidents

Richard Bissell once said that setting up Area 51 inside a nuclear testing facility
kept the curiosity-seekers at bay. With Operation Plumbbob, a 1957 atomic test
series that involved thirty consecutive nuclear explosions , he got more than he
bargained for. With the arms race in full swing, the Department of Defense had
decided it was just a matter of time before an airplane transporting an atomic
bomb would crash on American soil, unleashing a radioactive disaster the likes
of which the world had never seen. In the twenty-first century, this kind of
weapon would be referred to as a dirty bomb.

The dirty bomb menace posed a growing threat to the internal security of the
country, one the Pentagon wanted to make less severe by testing the nightmare
scenario first. The organization needed to do this in a controlled environment,
away from the urban masses, in total secrecy. No one outside the project,
absolutely no one, could know. Officials from the Armed Forces Special
Weapons Project decided that the perfect place to do this was Area 51 . inside the
Dreamland airspace, about four or five miles northwest of Groom Lake. If the
dirty bomb was set off outside the legal perimeter of the Nevada Test Site,
secrecy was all but guaranteed. As far as specifics were concerned, there was an
apocalyptic prerequisite the likes of which no government had ever dealt with
before. Weapons testers needed “a site that could be relinquished for 20.000
years .”

Code-named the 57 Project, and later Project 57, the Atomic Energy
Commission, the U.S. Air Force, and EG&G would work together to simulate an
Air Force airplane crash involving an XW-25 nuclear warhead—a crash in
which radioactive particles would “accidentally” be dispersed on the ground.

The land around the mock crash site would be contaminated by plutonium,
which, according to scientists, would take 24,100 years to decay by half. At the
time, scientists had no idea what accidental plutonium dispersal in open air
would do to beings and things in the element’s path. The 57 Project was a test
that would provide critical data to that end. There were further prerequisites,
ones that had initially narrowed the possibilities of usable land to that within the
Nevada Test Site. The place needed to contain “no preexisting contamination.”
to be reasonably flat, and to cover approximately fifty square miles. Ideally, it
would be a dry lake valley, “preferably a site where mountain-valley drainage
currents would induce large amount of shear,” or flow. It had to be as far away as
possible from prying eyes, but most important, it had to be a place where there
was no possibility that the public could learn that officials were even considering
such a catastrophic scenario, let alone preparing for one. It was decided that in
press releases the 57 Project would only be referred to as “a safety test.” nothing
more. With a doctor named James Shreve Jr. in charge of things, the project had
an almost wholesome ring to it.

One dry lake bed originally considered was Papoose Lake, located six miles
due south of Groom Lake, also just outside the test site. But soil samples taken
by weapons planners revealed the earth there already had trace amounts of
plutonium, owing to previous nuclear explosions conducted inside the test site in
1951, 1952, and 1953, five miles to the west at another dry lake bed called
Frenchman Flat. Further complicating matters, Papoose Lake was the subject of
contention between the Atomic Energy Commission and two local farmers, the
Stewart brothers. The dispute was over eight dead cows that had been grazing at
Papoose Lake in March of 1953 when a twenty-four-kiloton nuclear bomb called
Nancy was detonated nearby. Nancy sent radioactive fallout on livestock across
the region, including those grazing at Papoose Lake. Sixteen of the Stewart
brothers’ horses died from acute radiation poisoning, along with their cows. The
commission had paid the Stewarts three hundred dollars for each dead horse but
stubbornly refused to pay the men for the dead cows. Instead, a lieutenant
colonel from the Army’s Veterinary Corps, Bernard F. Trum, wrote a long,
jargon-filled letter to the farmers stating there was “nothing to indicate that [the
blast] was the actual cause of the [cows’] deaths.” Instead, the commission
insisted the cows’ deaths were “text book cases... of vitamin-A deficiency.”

Shamelessly, the commission had a second doctor, a bovine specialist with
Los Alamos, to certify in writing that “Grass Tetany” or “general lack of good
forage” had killed the cows, not the atomic explosion over the hill. To add insult

to injury, the Atomic Energy Commission told the Stewart brothers that its Los
Alamos scientists had subjected their own cows to atomic blasts in New Mexico
during the original Trinity bomb test in 1945. Those cows, the commission
stated, were “burnt by the radioactivity over their entire dorsum and yet have
remained in excellent health for years.” In essence, the commission was saying,
Our nuked cows are alive; yours should be too.

The Stewart brothers remained unconvinced and requested a note of
explanation they could understand. In 1957, as weapons planners were
determining where to hold Project 57, the dispute remained unresolved. Fearing
that any attention brought to Papoose Lake might ignite the unresolved Stewart
brothers’ controversy, officials crossed the Papoose Lake land parcel off the
location list.

The focus narrowed to a large, flat expanse in the Groom Lake valley, the
same valley where the CIA was running its U-2 program. There, to the northwest
of Area 51, lay a perfect sixteen-square-mile flat parcel of land—relatively
virgin territory that no one was using. A record search determined that all
grazing rights to the area had been “extinguished,” meaning that local farmers
and ranchers were already prohibited from allowing their livestock to roam
there. Then weapons-test planners made an aerial inspection of Groom Lake .
Colonel E. A. Blue joined the project’s director, Dr. Shreve, in an overhead
scout. In a classified memo, the two men joked about how they spotted a herd of
cows roaming around the chosen site, “60 to 80 cattle who hadn’t gotten the
word.” and that “somehow information must be gotten to them and their
masters.” Gallows humor for cows.

A land-use deal between the Department of Defense, which controlled the
area for the Air Force, and the Atomic Energy Commission, the civilian
organization that controlled the test site, was struck. As it was with the rest of the
loosely defined Area 51, this desired land parcel lay conveniently just outside
the legal boundaries of the Nevada Test Site, to the northeast. This allowed the
57 Project to fall under the rubric of a military operation, which could assist in
shielding it from official Atomic Energy Commission disclosures, the same way
calling it a safety test did. Anyone with oversight regarding unsafe nuclear tests
simply didn’t know where to look. In the end, the land designation even allowed
Project 57 to be excluded from official Nevada Test Site maps . As of 2011, it
still is.

In March of 1957, workers cordoned off the area in preparation for Project
57. The nuclear warhead was flown from Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico to

the Yucca Lake airstrip at the test site and transferred to Building 11, where it
would remain in storage until explosion day. Since it needed its own name for
record-keeping purposes, officials decided to designate it Area 13.

Richard Mingus was tired . The twenty-four-year-old Ohio native had been
working double shifts at the Sands hotel for three years and four months, ever
since he returned home from the front lines of the Korean War. Newly married,
Mingus and his wife, Gloria, had their first baby on the way. The Sands was the
most popular spot on the Las Vegas Strip. It was the place where high rollers and
partygoers went for entertainment, where they could hear the Rat Packers sing in
the Copa Room. The restaurant at the Sands was a first-class operation, with
silver service delivered from over-the-shoulder trays. Richard Mingus was proud
to work there. Once he even got to wait on Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher.
But by the summer of 1956, the novelty of hearing celebrity singers like Frank
Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. perform had taken a backseat to the
financial uncertainty that comes with a waiter’s life. When he’d learned Gloria,
the light of his life, was pregnant, Mingus became elated. Then economic
insecurity settled in. In addition to having a little one on the way, Mingus
supported his widowed mother back east.

Looking back, Mingus reflects on that time in his life. “You can never guess
what the future holds,” he says. That summer, life dealt Richard and Gloria
Mingus a cruel blow. Gloria delivered prematurely, and their baby died in the
hospital. They were without health insurance, and the bills accompanying the
tragedy left Richard Mingus overwhelmed. Gloria became despondent. “I
needed a solid job. And one that came with hospital benefits,” Mingus explains.
“It was time for me to find a profession. So I asked one of the waiters at the
Sands if he knew about anything.” Mingus learned the federal government was
hiring security guards. The following morning he drove over to Second Avenue
and Bonanza Street to apply.

There, Mingus stood in a long line of about a hundred other applicants for
what seemed like hours. The Nevada Test Site, which was a sixty-five-mile
commute to the northwest, had jobs. Rumors were those jobs paid well. The
atomic tests, which had begun five years earlier, in 1951, had brought tens of
millions of dollars in business to the Las Vegas economy. For the most part, Las
Vegas as a city had endorsed the tests because they were such an economic boon.
And yet it had been more than a year since the last atomic test series, which was

called Operation Teapot and which was made up of twelve nuclear bomb
explosions, including one that was dropped from an airplane. Controversies
about fallout, particularly debates involving strontium-90, the deadly by-product
of uranium and plutonium fission, had made their way into the public domain.
For a while, there was even talk among locals that the test site could get shut
down. Standing in line, Mingus got the sense that closing down the test site was
far from reality. And he was right—weapons planners were gearing up for the
largest atomic bomb test series ever to take place in the continental United
States.

Mingus stood in line for a long time. Finally, a sergeant took his fingerprints
and asked him if he had any military background. When Mingus said he’d
served in Korea, the sergeant nodded with approval and sent him into a separate
room. Las Vegas in the 1950s was a town made up largely of gamblers,
swindlers, and fortune seekers. The fact that Mingus was a former soldier with
an honorable discharge made him an ideal candidate for what the government
was after: good men who could qualify for a Q clearance, which was required
for a job involving nuclear weapons. Mingus filled out paperwork and answered
a battery of questions. In just a few hours, Mingus was, tentatively, offered a job.
Exactly what the job entailed, the recruiter could not say, but it paid more than
twice what the best local waiters made during a stellar night at the Sands. Most
important to Mingus, the job came with health insurance—Gloria’s dream. He
could begin work as soon as his security clearance came in. That process could
take as long as five months.

Richard Mingus had no idea that he was about to become one of the first
Federal Services security guards assigned to Area 51. Or that the very first
nuclear test he would be asked to stand guard over would be Project 57—
America’s first dirty bomb .

From the first atomic explosions of Operation Crossroads, in 1946, until the
Nevada Test Site opened its doors, in 1951, America tested its nuclear weapons
on atolls and islands in the Pacific Ocean. There, in a vast open area roughly
twice the size of the state of Texas, the Pentagon enjoyed privacy. The Marshall
Islands were a million miles away from the American psyche, which made
secret-keeping easy. But the Pacific Proving Ground was a long haul for the
Pentagon in terms of moving more than ten thousand people and millions of tons
of equipment back and forth from the United States for each test series.

Guarding these military assets en route to the Pacific required a near-war
footing. The ship carrying the nuclear material also carried the lion’s share of the
nation’s nuclear physicists, scientists, and weapons engineers. The precious
cargo required constant air cover and an escort by destroyer battleships while it
made its zigzag course across the ocean. When Dr. Edward Teller, the Hungarian
emigre and father of the hydrogen bomb, began arguing for an atomic bombing
range in America to make things easier on everyone, there was hardly a voice of
dissent from Washington. Officials at the Pentagon, the Armed Forces Special
Weapons Project , and the Atomic Energy Commission all agreed with Teller and
began encouraging the president to authorize a continental test site.

Science requires trial and error, Dr. Teller explained. As nuclear bombs grew
more powerful, as weapons went from kilotons to megatons, scientists at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory were struggling with discrepancies between
theoretical calculations—equations made on paper—and the actual results the
weapons produced. If the Pacific Proving Ground was the Olympic stadium for
nuclear bombs, the scientists needed a local gym, a place to keep in shape and
try out new ideas. Nevada would be perfect, everyone agreed. It was only a two-
hour plane ride away from Los Alamos in New Mexico, as compared to the
weeklong journey it took to get people to the Pacific Proving Ground.

In 1950, a top secret feasibility study code-named Project Nutmeg
determined for President Truman that a huge area in southern Nevada, one of the
least populated areas in the nation not situated on a coastline, was the most ideal
place in the continental United States to test nuclear weapons. The Nevada Test
and Training Range quickly became 4,687 square miles of government-
controlled land. “ The optimum conditions as to meteorological, remote available
land and logistics” can be found there, the study explained. Even more
convenient, there was an airstrip located just seven miles from the entrance of
the test site, at a government-owned airfield called Indian Springs.

Before the Nevada Test Site was a nuclear bombing range it had been an
animal sanctuary. In the 1930s, the Department of the Interior made the region a
wildlife reservation. Herds of antelope and wild horses roamed the high-desert
landscape with mountain lions and bighorn sheep. Kit fox and sidewinder
rattlesnakes were more prevalent there than anywhere else in the country.
Centuries earlier, Native Americans lived in the caves in the mountains. They
left behind magnificent paintings and ornate petroglyphs on the caves’ rock
walls. In the mid-1800s, settlers built silver- and copper-mining camps, giving
the local geography colorful names such as Skull Mountain, Indian Springs, and

Jackass Flats. But by 1942, America had entered World War II, and the entire
region was withdrawn from public access for War Department use. The Army set
up a conventional bombing range across what would later include the Nevada
Test Site, Area 51, and the Nellis Air Force Base. It was an ideal place to train
aerial gunners, far from people and resplendent with flat, dry lake beds, which
were perfect for target practice and for landing airplanes. After the war ended,
the bombing range was closed and its buildings were allowed to deteriorate. But
the Army hung on to the land rights for possible future use. That future use
became clear when 1,350 acres, or about one quarter of the restricted area, was
parceled off and called the Nevada Test Site. On January 27, 1951, at 5:45 a.m.,
an Air Force B-50D bomber dropped the first atomic bomb on U.S. soil, onto a
dry lake bed called Frenchman Flat, inside the Nevada Test Site.

Edward Teller loved the closeness of Nevada and referred to the bombs being
set off there as “quickie” tests. Almost immediately, a second nuclear laboratory,
called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, was created by the
Atomic Energy Commission with the goal of fostering competition with the Los
Alamos nuclear lab. Shortly before the creation of Livermore, scientists at Los
Alamos had started to challenge the military establishment regarding what the
future of the nuclear bomb should or should not be. Uninterested in what the
creators of the atomic bomb had to say, the Department of Defense pushed back
by developing Livermore. Competition fosters productivity; the greater the
rivalry, the more intense the competition will be. Indeed, it did not take long for
a fierce competition to develop between the two outfits, with Los Alamos and
Livermore fighting for weapons contracts and feasibility-study awards.

Dreaming up prototypes for new weapons was how contracts were won. Dr.
Teller argued for the need to experiment with certain “boosters,” like the
radioactive isotope of hydrogen tritium, which could further enhance yield. If a
scientist or his lab could make a strong enough case for the necessity of testing
such a thing, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and the Atomic Energy
Commission could easily allocate money for it. The goal was singular: get the
highest-yield bombs to fit inside the smallest packages, ideally ones that could
be put into the nose cone of a missile designed by Wernher Von Braun.

In five short years, from January 1951 to January 1956, a total of forty-nine
nuclear bombs were exploded at the Nevada Test Site, bringing the worldwide
total for atmospheric nuclear explosions by the United States to eighty-five.
Which is when Richard Mingus joined the security force at the Nevada Test Site
and Area 51, just in time for Operation Plumbbob, the largest, most ambitious

series of nuclear weapons tests in the United States so far. The first test
scheduled in the thirty-test Plumbbob series was Project 57.

In the flat Nevada desert, Richard Mingus took to work in top secret nuclear
security like a fish to water. He loved the formal protocols and the way
everything was ordered. “I developed a reputation for being tough,” Mingus
recalls. From the checklists to the radio codes, everything at the Nevada Test Site
and at Area 51 worked with a military precision that Mingus thrived on. What
others may have found monotonous, spending long hours guarding nuclear
weapons in a vast desert-landscape setting, Mingus found challenging. He
passed the pistol training with flying colors. He studied the manuals with such
intensity, he ended up scoring in the top 90 percent of all the trainees. His
excellence earned Mingus a position as one of only five men chosen to guard the
top secret base over the hill from Yucca Flat. For employees of Federal Services,
Incorporated, the first thing learned was that the facility was to be referred to
only as Delta site. The radio channel on which Mingus and his colleagues spoke
could be heard by guards all over the test site. The code was important; it was
Delta, nothing more . Mingus remembered how everything at Area 51 worked
with top secret/sensitive compartmented information protocols. “Even my
sergeant wasn’t cleared to go over the hill to Delta. He was my superior but he
didn’t have a need-to-know what I was doing over there,” Mingus explains. “So
I was very curious the first time driving out there, looking out the window...
wondering what’s ahead. When we got there, it was not very fancy at all. Just an
airstrip in the desert. Later, we were told the place was also called Watertown but
never to use that word. Over the radio we always referred to our position at
Delta, never anything else.” That first day at Delta, aka Area 51, Richard Mingus
and his four colleagues were met by a CIA security representative at the west¬
facing perimeter gate. “He drove us into the area. We went straight to the admin
building, which was just a little wooden structure with a patch cord telephone
system sitting there on a desk. The sergeant looked at me, pointed to a chair, and
said, ‘Dick, that’s your post.’” A surge of intimidation swept over Mingus. “A
country boy like me, I looked at the phone system and I thought, This is the
hottest spot on the post, the place where all the communication from the CIA
comes in. I had never used a switchboard before and I knew if I wanted to keep
my job I’d have to learn real fast. As it turns out, there was plenty more time to
learn. The phone almost never rang. ‘Thirty-two thirty-two,’ that’s how I

answered the telephone. There were not many calls. And when someone did call,
they would almost always ask for the same person, a [generic] name like Joe
Smith, the code name for the commander at the base.”

At Area 51, Mingus and his colleagues rotated through four sentry posts: the
administration building, the top of a seventy-five-foot water tower, and the east
and west gates. The gate positions were used to control access to Area 51 by
land. On more than one occasion, Mingus turned away what he calls “overly
curious Air Force,” individuals who “just because they had rank, they thought
they should be able to come on in.” Mingus denied access to anyone not badged
for Area 51. “A few times things got real tense. We worked on strict orders and it
was my job to keep people out.” The water-tower post at the facility was used by
guards to keep an eye on the sky. “We were on the lookout for a rogue helicopter
or small aircraft, that type of thing,” Mingus recalls. During this time, the
security guards got to know many of the U-2 pilots. “They’d fly low enough
over me so I could see their faces in the cockpit. They got a kick out of flying
over our security posts. They’d buzz over us and after they landed they’d always
make a joke about not wanting us sleeping on the job.”

Richard Mingus had been guarding Area 51 for a little over a month when the
Los Alamos scientists and the EG&G engineers began their final preparations
for Project 57 at Area 13. A supervisor at the Nevada Test Site asked Mingus if
he was willing to work some considerable overtime for the next few weeks. He
had been requested to serve as the guard to keep both Area 51 and Area 13
secure. Considerable overtime meant double-time pay, and Mingus agreed.
Finally, a shot date of April 3 was chosen. Shot, Mingus quickly learned, was
commission-speak for “nuclear detonation.” As was required by an agreement
between the Atomic Energy Commission and the State of Nevada, the
Department of Defense prepared a simple statement for the press. “A highly
classified safety test [is] being conducted by Dr. James Shreve Jr., in April
1957,” read the Las Vegas Sun. The public had no idea the Department of
Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission would be simulating an airplane
crash involving an XW-25 nuclear warhead by initiating a one-point detonation
with high explosives at Area 13. Neither did any of the U-2 program participants
living in Quonset huts just a few miles to the east. Scientists predicted the
warhead would release radioactive plutonium particles, but because a test like
Project 57 had never been conducted before, scientists really had no clear idea of
what would happen.

Workers set up four thousand fallout collectors around a ten-by-sixteen-

square-mile block of land. These galvanized steel pans, called sticky pans, had
been sprayed with tacky resin and were meant to capture samples of plutonium
particles released into the air. Sixty-eight air-sampler stations equipped with
millipore filter paper were spread over seventy square miles. An accidental
detonation of a nuclear weapon in an urban area would be far more catastrophic
than one in a remote desert area such as Groom Lake, and the Department of
Defense wanted to test how city surfaces would respond to plutonium
contamination, so mock-ups of sidewalks, curbs, and pavement pieces were set
out in the desert landscape. Some fourteen hundred blocks of highway asphalt
and wood float finish concrete were fabricated and set around on the ground. To
see how automobiles would contaminate when exposed to plutonium, cars and
trucks were parked among the juniper bushes and Joshua trees. As zero day got
closer, Mingus saw preparations pick up. Giant air-sampling balloons were
tethered to the earth and floated over Area 13 at various elevations; some were
five feet off the ground and others a thousand feet up, giving things a circus feel.
Nine burros, 109 beagles, 10 sheep, and 31 albino rats were put in cages and set
to face the dirty bomb. EG&G’s rapatronic photographic equipment would
record the radioactive cloud within the first few microseconds of detonation. A
wooden decontamination building was erected just a few hundred yards down
from Mingus’s post. It was nothing fancy, just a wooden shack “ stocked with
radiation equipment and protective clothing , shower stalls... with a three-
hundred-fifty-gallon hot-water supply and a dressing room with benches and
hangers for clothes.” Shortly before shot day, workers installed a “two-foot-wide
wooden approach walk” and covered it with kraft paper.

Shot day came and went without the test. All nuclear detonations are subject
to the weather; Mother Nature, not the Pentagon’s Armed Forces Special
Weapons Project officers, had final say regarding zero hour. Mother Nature’s
emissary at the test site was Harold “Hal” Mueller, a meteorologist from UCLA.
In the case of Project 57, there was one weather problem after the next. It was
April in the high desert, which meant heavy winds, too much rain, and thick
clouds. For several days, snow threatened the skies. In the second week of April,
the winds were so intense that a blimp moored twelve miles south, at Yucca Flat,
crashed and deflated. On April 19, one of the Project 57 balloons broke loose ,
forcing General Starbird to issue a telegram notifying Washington, DC, of a
potential public relations nightmare. The balloon had sailed away from Area 13
and was headed in the direction of downtown Las Vegas. “A twenty-three foot
balloon towing two hundred feet one eighth inch steel aircraft cable escaped

Area 13 at 2255 hours April 19 PD,” read Starbird’s terse memo. His “best
estimate is that balloon will self-rupture and fall within boundaries of the Las
Vegas bombing and gunnery range,” and thereby go unnoticed. But General
Starbird and everyone else involved knew if the balloon were to escape the test
site’s boundaries, the entire Plumbbob series was at risk of cancellation. Lucky
for Starbird, the balloon crash-landed inside the Nevada Test and Training
Range.

The concept of using balloons in nuclear tests was first used in this series. In
thirteen of the thirty Plumbbob explosions scheduled to take place in spring and
summer of 1957, a balloon would be carrying the nuclear device off the ground.
Before balloons were used, expensive metal towers had been constructed to hold
the bomb, towers that guards like Richard Mingus spent hours tossing paper
airplanes from. “You needed something to keep your mind off the fact that the
bomb you were standing next to was live and could flatten a city,” Mingus says.
To get weapons test engineers like A1 O’Donnell up that high—the towers were
usually three hundred, five hundred, or seven hundred feet tall—in order to wire
the bomb, rudimentary elevators had to be built next to the bomb towers; these
were also very expensive. A balloon shot was far more cost-effective and also
produced a lot less radioactivity than vaporizing metal did. For the public,
however, the safety and security of hanging nuclear bombs from balloons raised
an obvious question: What if one of the balloons were to get away?

Finally, during the early-morning hours of April 24, the weather cleared and
the go-ahead was given for Project 57. At 6:27 a.m., local time, the nuclear
warhead in Area 13 was hand-fired by an employee from EG&G . simulating the
plane crash without actually crashing a plane. Mingus remembers the day
because “it was just a few days after Easter, as I recall. Finally a good weather
day. I don’t remember snow but I do remember I had to get muddy to get to my
post. Area 13 was way out in the boondocks. Barely any people around because
it was a military test, not AEC. There wasn’t much traffic and from where I was
parked in my truck, I could see a mile down the road. I remember it was cold
and I had my winter coat on. No radiation-protection gear.” The predicted
pattern of fallout was to the north . When the dust from the small radioactive
cloud settled, plutonium had spread out over 895 square acres adjacent to Groom
Lake. Mingus says, “It wasn’t spectacular. It didn’t have a big fireball. But it
involved an extreme amount of radiation, which made it nasty. I remember how
dirty it was.”

The bomb was indeed dirty . Plutonium, if inhaled, is one of the most deadly

elements known to man. Unlike other radiation that the body can handle in low
dosages, such as an X-ray, one-millionth of a gram of plutonium will kill a
person if it gets in his or her lungs. According to a 1982 Defense Nuclear
Agency request for an unclassified “extract” of the original report , most of
which remains Secret/Restricted Data, Project 57 tests confirmed for the
scientists that if a person inhales plutonium “it gets distributed principally in
bone and remains there indefinitely as far as human life is concerned. One
cannot outlive the influence because the alpha half-life of plutonium-239 is of
the order of 20,000 years.” These findings came as a result of many tests
performed on the dead burros, beagles, sheep, and albino rats that had been
exposed to the dirty bomb. So why wasn’t Richard Mingus dead?

The same report revealed that “air samplers indicated high airborne
concentrations of respirable plutonium remarkably far downwind .” Plutonium is
a poison of paradox. It can be touched without lethal effects. Because it emits
alpha particles, the weakest form of radiation, plutonium can be blocked from
entering the body by a layer of paper or a layer of skin. Equally incongruous is
the fact that plutonium is not necessarily lethal if ingested. “Once in the
stomach, its stay in the body is short, for [particles] are excreted as an inert
material with virtually no body assimilation,” read another report. In other
words, plutonium is deadly for humans and animals only if particles reach the
lower respiratory tract.

Mingus never breathed any particles into his lungs as he kept watch for ten to
twelve hours at a time on a desolate stretch of land between Area 13 and Area
51, guarding two of the most classified projects in post-World War II American
history: Projects 57 and Aquatone, the U-2. As the weeks wore on and Project
57’s plutonium particles settled onto the desert floor, Mingus watched men from
Sandia, Reynolds Electric and Engineering Company, and EG&G go in and out
of the contamination site. They’d put on face masks and seal areas on their
bodies where their clothing met their skin by using household tape. They passed
by a small metal sign that read do not enter, contaminated area so they could
swap out trays, feed the animals that were still alive, and remove the dead and
dying ones. They replaced spent millipore paper with fresh strips and then
headed back down to the laboratory and the animal morgue inside the Nevada
Test Site. Meanwhile, Mingus watched overhead as the U-2 pilots made their
final test flights, putting in as many flight hours as they could before their
missions became real. Soon these pilots would be dispatched overseas, where
they would be stationed on secret bases and fly dangerous missions that

technically did not exist and that the public would not learn about for decades.

Data obtained as a result of Project 57 confirmed for the Department of
Defense what it already knew. “Plutonium has a 24,000 year half-life. It does not
decay.” Once plutonium embeds in soil, it tends not to move. “There are few
instances of plutonium depletion with time. There is little tendency for the
plutonium to change position (depth) in soil with time.” Provided a person
doesn’t inhale plutonium particles, and provided the plutonium doesn’t get into
the bloodstream or the bones, a person can pass through an environment laden
with plutonium and live into his eighties; Richard Mingus is a case in point.

Within a year of the detonation of the dirty bomb, the scientists were satisfied
with their preliminary data, and Project 57 wound down. The acreage at Area 13
was fenced off with simple barbed wire. Stickers that read contaminated
materials were attached to the bumpers and hoods of Atomic Energy
Commission vehicles before they were buried deep underground. Clothing
contaminated with “alpha-emitting material was sealed in plastic bags and buried
in the contaminated waste area.” And yet, by the summer of 1958, Project 57’s
director, Dr. James Shreve, authored a very troubling report—one that was
marked Secret-Restricted Data—noting that the measurements research group
had made a potentially deadly observation. “Charles Darwin studied an acre of
garden in which he claimed 53,000 hard working earthworms moved 18 tons of
soil .” wrote Dr. Shreve. “Translocation of soil, earthworms’ ingestion of
plutonium, could turn out to be a significant influence, intentional or
unintentional, in the rehabilitation of weapon-accident environment.” In other
words, plutonium-carrying earthworms that had passed through Area 13, or birds
that ate those earthworms, could at some point in the future get to a garden down
the road or trees in another field. “The idea of an entirely separate program on
ecology in Area 13 had occurred to [names unclear] in the summer of 1957,”
wrote Shreve, “but the AEP/UCL A logical group to undertake the investigation
was too committed on Operation Plumbbob to consider the responsibility.” The
twenty-nine nuclear bombs about to blow in the rest of the Plumbbob series
would take precedent over any kind of effort to contain future harm done by the
first test in the series, the Project 57 dirty bomb. Out in the desert, men with
extraordinary power and punishing schedules worked without any effective
oversight. As one EG&G weapons engineer remarked, “Things at the test site
rolled fast and loose.” Not until as late as 1998 was the top layer of earth from
Area 13 scraped up and removed. By then, earthworms in the area, and birds
eating those earthworms, had been moving plutonium-laden soil who knows

how far for more than forty years.

With the plutonium-contamination test out of the way, the Armed Forces
Special Weapons Project began moving forward with the rest of the 1957 open-
air nuclear-test series. It was a boon to the Las Vegas economy, supplying
millions of dollars in resources and in jobs. Each test was reported to cost about
three million dollars—approximately seventy-six million in 2011 dollars—
although it is impossible to learn what that figure did or did not include.

Nearly seven thousand civilians were badged to work at the test site during
Operation Plumbbob. Another fourteen to eighteen thousand employees of the
Department of Defense also participated; official figures vary. But despite all the
money being pumped into Las Vegas, the debate over fallout threatened to
cancel the tests. Just two weeks before Project 57 contaminated 895 acres
adjacent to Groom Lake with plutonium, Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling
made a statement that spooked the public and threatened the tests. Pauling said
that as a result of nuclear tests, 1 percent of children born the following year
would have serious birth defects. The Atomic Energy Commission responded by
positioning their own doctors’ opinions prominently in the news. Dr. C. W.
Shilling, deputy director of biology and medicine for the Atomic Energy
Commission, ridiculed Linus Pauling, saying that “excessively hot baths can be
as damaging to the human sex glands as radioactive fallout in the amount
received in the last five years from the testing of atomic weapons.” In hindsight,
this is astonishingly erroneous, but at the time it was what Americans were
willing to believe.

Almost every newspaper in the country carried stories about the debate, often
presenting diametrically opposed views on the subject in columns side by side.
“Children are smaller on island sprinkled with nuclear fallout,” read the Santa
Fe New Mexican; “Study Finds Kids Born to Marshall Islanders Are Perfectly
Normal,” headlined another; “2000 Scientists Ask President to Ban Bomb
Tests,” the Los Angeles Mirror declared. Editorials, such as the one published on
June 7 in the Los Angeles Times, suggested that a recent influx of seagull and
pelican deaths along the California coast was proof that the biblical End of
Times was at hand.

All across Europe there were protests. Japan tried to get the tests canceled.
When it became clear that the tests would go forward, one hundred enraged
Japanese students protested at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. When things turned
violent, heavy police reinforcements were called in. Prime minister of India
Jawaharlal Nehru called the tests a “menace” and, in a personal appeal to

President Eisenhower, proclaimed that unless all nuclear tests were stopped, the
Earth would be hurled into a “pit of disaster.” Soviet scientist Professor Federov
publicly accused the United States of developing a weapon that was meant to
cause worldwide drought and flood. To counter the campaign aimed at putting an
end to nuclear testing, the Atomic Energy Commission kept the propaganda
rolling out. Colorful characters such as Willard Frank Libby, one of the Agency’s
leading scientists and known as Wild Bill of the Atom Bomb, insisted that
“science is like an art. You have to work at it or you will go stale. Testing is a
small risk.” In the end the weaponeers won. When it was finally announced that
the Plumbbob series had received presidential approval, the press release
described the twenty-four nuclear tests (the other six were called safety tests) as
“low yield tests,” promising none would be more than “30 kilotons.” The six
“safety tests” were generally excluded from mention. The magnitude of the
megaton bombs set off in the Pacific had fundamentally warped the notion of
atomic destruction. The Hiroshima bomb, which killed seventy thousand people
instantly and another thirty to fifty thousand by radiation poisoning over the next
few days, was less than half the size of what the U.S. government was now
calling “low yield.”

The tests were important, the president promised the public. The government
needed to build up its “encyclopedia of nuclear information.” The Army needed
its troops to practice “maneuvers” on a nuclear battlefield and to record how
soldiers would perform in the event of a nuclear battle. The government had to
know: At what distance could a military jeep drive through a nuclear shock
wave? How did a blast wave affect a hill versus a dale? What effect would
weapons have on helicopters, blimps, and airplanes when they flew close by a
mushroom cloud? The Pentagon wondered and said it needed to find out. And
so, in the sparsely populated desert of southern Nevada, the Plumbbob nuclear
weapons tests went ahead as planned.

Following Project 57, the first nuclear explosion in the series to form a
mushroom cloud was called Boltzmann, detonated on May 28, 1957. At twelve
kilotons, it was approximately the same size as the Hiroshima bomb and caused
Area 51 personnel located eleven miles over the hill to be temporarily evacuated
from the base. The bomb was described in a press release simply as a “Los
Alamos Scientific Laboratory device.” On June 9, 1957, the New York Times
printed the Atomic Energy Commission’s “partial schedule” of the Operation
Plumbbob atomic tests so that summer tourists wanting to see a mushroom cloud
could plan their itineraries accordingly. “This is the best time in history for the

non-ancient but none the less honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching,” the
New York Times said. According to Richard Mingus, it seemed that higher¬
ranking CIA officers at Area 51 did not agree with the Gray Lady’s assessment.
“After one blast really shook the place, a group of them jumped in someone’s
private aircraft and took off pretty fast.” One report, declassified in 1993, noted
the damage: “The blast buckled aircraft hangar doors, shattered windows in the
mess hall and broke a ventilator panel on a dormitory.” Area 51 employees were
once again evacuated. Neither Richard Bissell nor his team was prepared for
such drastic effects and certainly not as a matter of course. Whether the Agency
protested or complied remains classified, but the U-2s were quickly flown to a
remote area of the north base at Edwards Air Force Base in California and
hidden in hangars there. Nothing was going to stop the Atomic Energy
Commission and its tests. Operation Plumbbob was in full swing.

Then came the Hood bomb.

It was the middle of the night on July 5, 1957. Richard Mingus was getting ready
to head to the test site for work. Gloria was finally pregnant again, and it had
been a celebratory Fourth of July. Now Mingus prepared himself for what he
knew was going to be an exceedingly long day. The shot was going to be big; so
big, the commission had already evacuated every last person from Area 51. Only
the caretakers were left. Richard Mingus kissed Gloria good-bye and climbed
into his new 1957 DeSoto. How Mingus loved his car, with its four doors and
long fins, a luxury made affordable by long overtime hours at the test site. The
morning of the Hood bomb, Mingus drove the sixty-five miles to the main gate
at Camp Mercury, located at the southernmost end of the test site, off Highway
95. It was somewhere around 1:30 a.m. Hood was scheduled for detonation early
that morning, in Area 9. On the seat beside him, Mingus carried his lunch,
always lovingly packed by Gloria in a small, wooden lunch box. Inside there
was a sandwich, a can opener, and a can of Mingus’s favorite: Dinty Moore stew.
Once inside the gates of the test site, Mingus parked his DeSoto and transferred
his belongings into an Atomic Energy Commission tmck. Then he drove the
familiar route from Camp Mercury to the control point. First he made sure to
stop by the ice house, where he could fill up a five-gallon can with water,
making sure to put a big block of ice inside. “The size of the Hood bomb was
classified but everyone knew it was going to be really big,” Mingus explains.

Three miles to the north, at Area 9, the Army would be conducting hundreds

of tests during and immediately after the explosion. Seventy Chester White pigs
wearing military uniforms were enclosed in cages facing the bomb and placed a
short distance from ground zero. The pigs had been anesthetized to counter the
pain of the beta radiation burns they were certain to receive. Using the pigs, the
Army wanted to determine which fabrics best withstood an atomic bomb blast.
Farther back, lying in trenches, were one hundred soldiers, all of whom were
participating in twenty-four scientific experiments. In classified papers obtained
by the author, scientists called this the Indoctrination Project . A committee called
the Committee on Human Resources was conducting these secret tests on
soldiers to determine how they would react psychologically when nuclear bombs
started going off. The Committee on Human Resources wanted to study the
“psychology of panic” and thereby develop “emotional engineering programs”
for soldiers for future use.

A second battalion of 2,100 troops was stationed farther back, in Area 4 and
Area 7, troops whose job was to simulate a “ mythical attack by an aggressor
force against Las Vegas, conducted over four days.” A mile to the south, twenty-
five hundred Marines would be working on combined air-ground exercises
during Hood, using an amphibian tractor called the LVTP5, the ship-to-shore
vehicle that was used in the Pacific during World War II, an “armored monster
capable of bringing Marines ashore with dry feet.” Dozens of helicopters
performed maneuvers as well. Medical divisions were present, tasked with
studying “blast biology,” to determine the primary and secondary effects of
flying bricks, timber, and glass. Different types of wood houses had been built to
see what could withstand a nuclear blast best: wood or wallboard; masonry or
metal; asbestos-shingle or tar-paper roof. The Federal Civilian Defense
Administration was testing different types of bomb shelters and underground
domes. One structure was ninety feet by ninety feet across and had a reinforced
door weighing a hundred tons that was mounted on a monorail. The Mosler Safe
Company sponsored and paid for a $500,000 nuclear-bombproof steel vault,
ideal for insurance companies and banks seeking ways to mitigate loss after a
nuclear attack.

Richard Mingus was at the control point when the Hood bomb went off, all
seventy-four kilotons of it. Almost immediately after the bomb detonated, a call
came in from Mingus’s boss, a man by the name of Sergeant May. There was a
major security problem, May was told. The Atomic Energy Commission had
forgotten to secure Area 51. May needed to send Mingus over to the evacuated
CIA facility immediately. “Once Sergeant May got off the phone he turned to me

quick and said, ‘Go to rad safe, check out a Geiger counter and get over to
Building 23 fast.”’ Mingus followed orders. He jumped into his Atomic Energy
Commission truck and raced toward Building 23.

Not only the yield size of Hood was classified; so was the fact that despite
the Atomic Energy Commission’s assurance that it was not testing
thermonuclear bombs, Hood was a thermonuclear bomb test. At seventy-four
kilotons, it was six times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and
remains in 2011 the largest bomb ever exploded over the continental United
States. The flash from the Hood bomb was visible from Canada to Mexico and
from eight hundred miles out at sea. “So powerful was the blast that it was felt
and seen over most of the Western United States as it lighted up the pre-dawn
darkness,” reported the United Press International. It took twenty-five minutes
for the nuclear blast wave to reach Los Angeles, 350 miles to the west. “LA
Awakened. Flash Seen, Shock Felt Here. Calls Flood Police Switch Board,”
headlined the Los Angeles Times. Right around the time the blast reached Los
Angeles, Richard Mingus reached Building 23, a solid concrete bunker where
radiation safety officers stayed during the explosions. In the distance, Mingus
saw that a large swath of the desert was on fire .

“You know about Delta?” the security officer inside Building 23 asked
Mingus.

“I’ve worked there many times,” Mingus said.

“Grab another fella and get out there,” the man said. “Find a place with the
least amount of radiation and set up a roadblock between the test site and Delta.”
The Atomic Energy Commission may have moved Area 51 workers off the test
site for the nuclear test, but entire buildings full of classified information
remained behind. That the facility was not being physically secured by a guard
had been an oversight. Now Richard Mingus was being asked to plug that
security hole.

Mingus drove quickly up through the test site, heading north toward Area 51.
“The whole of Bandit Mountain was on fire,” Mingus explains, referring to the
low hills between Papoose Lake and Yucca Flat. “You could see individual
Joshua trees on fire.” Mingus kept on driving, moving as fast as he could while
avoiding an accident. But to get to where he needed to go, Mingus had to drive
straight through ground zero. “There were huge rocks and boulders in the road
sent there by the blast,” Mingus explains. “I had my windows rolled up tight and
I was driving like hell and my Geiger was screaming. I was worried if I drove
too fast and had a wreck in that area, that wouldn’t have been good. At guard

post three eighty-five, my Geiger counter was chirping like hell. I remember
distinctly it was reading eight point five Rs [never considered a safe amount].
We’d already deactivated that post because of the bomb and now it was way too
hot to stay there so I drove on over the hill to Area 51.”

When Mingus arrived at Groom Lake, his Geiger counter finally settled
down. It had been approximately fifty minutes since the bomb had gone off.
Having reached forty-eight thousand feet, the mushroom cloud would have
already floated over Area 13 and Area 51 by that time. Most likely, it was
somewhere over Utah now. “When I pulled into Area 51, it was like a ghost
town,” Mingus recalls. “I set up a west-facing post. I could see far. Pretty soon,
the other guard arrived. He took up the post at the control tower and I stayed in
the truck, parked there on the road facing west.” Mingus was fewer than ten
miles from ground zero, where the Hood bomb had exploded just an hour before.
The blast wave had hit Area 51 with such force, it buckled the metal doors on
several of the west-facing buildings, including a maintenance hangar and the
supply warehouse. Radioactive ash floated down from the sky. And yet, despite
the near-constant rain of nuclear fallout, the requirement for security took
precedent. Mingus drank water from his five-gallon jug and waited for the
smoke from the nuclear bomb to clear. He ate the sandwich that Gloria had made
for him and watched the hills burn. After several hours, he took the can of Dinty
Moore stew from his lunchbox and opened it with the can opener that Gloria
always made sure to pack. Mingus got out of the AEC truck and opened the
hood. He set the soup can on the control block and stirred it with a spoon. It
didn’t take long for the liquid to heat up. Mingus got back in the car and checked
to see if his radio was working. “Delta is secure,” Mingus said before kicking
back to enjoy his stew. For the rest of the day and well into the night, every half
hour a voice came over the radio from the control point asking if everything was
“okay.” Each time, Mingus let his boss know that Groom Lake was secure. He
didn’t see another soul out there in the desert for the rest of the day. By nightfall,
all that was left of the fire were the Joshua trees smoldering on the hills. The
land at the test site had been appropriately chosen; mostly it was just creosote
bush and sand. The bushes had burned, and the sand, after being subjected to
5,400 degrees Fahrenheit, had fused into little pieces of glass. Between the
fallout and the structural damage, Area 51 had become uninhabitable . After
Hood, the once-bustling classified facility transformed into a ghost town
overnight—not unlike the mining towns that had preceded it a century before.
The future of the secret base was, almost literally, up in the air.

CHAPTER SEVEN

From Ghost Town to Boomtown

After the Plumbbob atomic tests rocked Area 51, the CIA base sat like a ghost
town. Very little is known about what happened there from the summer of 1957
through the summer of 1959. According to Richard Mingus, a pair of caretakers
lived at the Groom Lake facility, a man and his wife. No record of their names
has been found. What is known is that after the Plumbbob series effectively shut
down operations at Area 51, workers from the Atomic Energy Commission
roamed the hills and valleys measuring fallout with Geiger counters in hand . As
impossible as it is to imagine in the twenty-first century, in the early days of
atomic testing there was no such thing as HAZMAT suits for workers
performing tasks in environments laden with WMD. Instead, workers combed
the desert floor dressed in white lab coats and work boots , looking for particles
of nuclear fallout. According to Atomic Energy Commission documents made
public in 1993, this radioactive debris varied in size, from pinhead particles to
pencil-size pieces of steel .

Much to the surprise of the nuclear scientists , the atomic weapons tests
revealed that sometimes, in the first milliseconds of destruction, the atomic
energy actually jettisoned splintered pieces of the bomb tower away from the
intense heat, intact, before vaporization could occur. These highly radioactive
pieces were then carried aloft in the clouds and deposited down on places like
Groom Lake, and Atomic Energy Commission workers could then locate them
with magnets . But while workers measured fallout patterns, weapons planners
moved ahead with preparations for the next atomic test series, which would take
place the following fall. The Operation Hardtack II nuclear test series would
prove even bigger than Plumbbob, in terms of the number of tests. From

September 12 to October 30, 1958, an astonishing thirty-seven nuclear bombs
were exploded—from tops of tall towers, in tunnels and shafts, on the surface of
the earth, and hanging from balloons. Areas 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, and 15 served as
ground zero for the detonations, all within eighteen miles of Area 51.

All but abandoned by the CIA and left to the elements, the once-bustling
Area 51 facility took on a spooky, postapocalyptic feel. Guards from the test site
did occasional spot tests, but the classified material had all been moved. While
the barren landscape weathered the fallout, the animals observed around Groom
Lake suffered terribly. Wild horses, deer, and rabbits roamed around the
abandoned hangars and vacant airfields covered with beta radiation burns—the
skin lesions caused by radiation poisoning that had plagued so many people and
animals in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war. It was also during this period
that a rare breach of security over Area 51 airspace occurred. On July 28, 1957, a
Douglas Aircraft Company employee named Edward K. Current made what he
said was an emergency landing on the former U-2 airstrip at Groom Lake. Mr.
Current told Atomic Energy Commission security officers who questioned him
that he had been on a cross-country training flight when he became lost and ran
low on fuel. He was held overnight and released. The following day, the Nevada
Test Organization uncharacteristically issued a press release stating that a private
pilot had mistakenly landed on the “Watertown landing strip.” Mr. Current never
made a public statement about his curious visit and remains the only civilian
who ever landed at Area 51 uninvited in a private airplane, got out, and roamed
around.

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, Richard Bissell waited for presidential
approval to plan more overflights using U-2s stationed at secret CIA facilities
overseas. And on the West Coast, in Burbank, California, Lockheed’s Kelly
Johnson was busy drawing up plans for the secret new spy plane. If Johnson was
able to secure the new CIA contract he was working on with Bissell, it would
likely mean Lockheed would spend the next decade fulfilling contract work out
at Area 51. But what Kelly Johnson needed at this point was a radar cross-
section wizard.

It was September of 1957, and Edward Lovick was standing on Lockheed’s
antenna pattern range tinkering with echo returns when Kelly Johnson
approached him for a chat. Lovick, then a thirty-eight-year-old physicist, was
known among colleagues as Lockheed’s radar man. Radar was still a relatively
new science but Lovick knew more about the subject than anyone else at
Lockheed at the time.

“Would you like to come work on an interesting project?” the boss asked
Lovick. In his eight-and-a-half-year tenure at the company, Lovick had never
seen Kelly Johnson before. But standing beside Johnson were William Martin
and L. D. MacDonald, two scientists Lovick considered to be brilliant. Martin
was Lovick’s former boss, and the three men used to work together in the
antenna lab. Martin and MacDonald had since disappeared to work on projects
inside Building 82, a large, nondescript hangar at the north end of the facility
where Lockheed’s black operations went on. As for the project that Kelly
Johnson was asking Lovick to join, Johnson said it might finish in six weeks.
Instead, it lasted thirty-two years. Although Lovick had no idea at the time, he
was being invited into Lockheed’s classified group, officially called Advanced
Development Projects but nicknamed the Skunk Works. In 1957, its primary
customer was the CIA.

Lovick was granted his top secret security clearance and briefed on the U-2
aircraft. He learned about the death of test pilot Robert Sieker at Area 51, just
four months before. “My first assignment at Lockheed came as a direct result of
this tragedy,” Lovick recalls. Sieker’s death had inadvertently played a role in
the invention of the most significant military application of the twentieth
century, and it led Ed Lovick to become known as the grandfather of stealth .
What the Boston Group at MIT had attempted to do—add stealth features via
paint to an existing airplane—had proved futile. But what Lovick and his team
would soon discover was that stealth could be achieved if it was designed as a
feature in the early drawing boards.

“The purpose of stealth, or antiradar technology,” Lovick explains, “is to
keep the enemy from sensing or detecting an aircraft, from tracking it, and
therefore from shooting it down. The goal is to trick the enemy’s air defenses
though camouflage or concealment.” Camouflage has been one of the most basic
foundations of military strength since man first made spears. In ancient warfare,
soldiers concealed themselves from the enemy using tree branches as disguise.
Millennia later, American independence was gained partly because the British
ignored this fundamental; their bright red coats made them easy targets for a
band of revolutionaries in drab, ragtag dress. In the animal kingdom, all species
depend on antipredator adaptation for survival, from the chameleon, which
defines the idea, to the arctic fox, which turns from brown in summer months to
white in winter. Lockheed’s U-2s were being tracked over the Soviet Union
because they had no camouflage or antiradar technologies, so the Soviets could
not only detect the U-2s but also accurately track the spy planes’ precise flight

paths.

To stay ahead of the Russians, Richard Bissell envisioned a new spy plane
that would outfox Soviet radar. The CIA wanted an airplane with a radar cross
section so low it would be close to invisible, the theory being that the Russians
couldn’t object to what they didn’t know was there.

The aircraft would be radically different , unlike anything the world had ever
seen, or rather, not seen, before. It would beat Soviet advances in radar
technology in three fields: height, speed, and stealth. The airplane needed to fly
at ninety thousand feet and at a remarkably unprecedented speed of twenty-three
hundred miles per hour, or Mach 3. In the late 1950s, for an aircraft to leave the
tarmac on its own power and sustain even Mach 2 flight was unheard-of. Speed
offered cover. In the event that a Mach 3 aircraft was tracked by radar, that kind
of speed would make it extremely difficult to shoot down. By comparison, a U-
2, which flew around five hundred miles per hour, would be seen by a Soviet
SA-2 missile system approximately ten minutes before it was in shoot-down
range, where it would remain for a full five minutes. An aircraft traveling at
Mach 3 would be seen by Soviet radar for fewer than a hundred and twenty
seconds before it could be fired upon, and it would remain in target range for
fewer than twenty seconds. After that twenty-second window closed, the
airplane would be too close for a Soviet missile to fire on it. The missile couldn’t
chase the airplane because, even though the top speed for a missile at the time
was Mach 3.5, once a missile gets that far into the upper atmosphere, it loses
precision and speed . Shooting down an airplane flying at three times the speed of
sound at ninety thousand feet was equivalent to hitting a bullet whizzing by
seventeen miles away with another bullet.

Lockheed was confident the speed element was possible, but it wasn’t in
charge of building the jet engines; the Pratt and Whitney corporation was. Height
was achievable; Lockheed had mastered flying at seventy thousand feet with the
U-2. Stealth was the feature that would be the most challenging, and it was also
the single most important feature of the spy plane to the CIA. To create stealth,
Lovick and his team had to master minutiae involving radar returns . Eventually,
they’d need a wide-open space and a full-size airplane, which is how Ed Lovick
and the Lockheed radar cross-section team became the first group of men after
the atomic blast to set up shop at Area 51. But first, they did this inside a room
within a hangar at Lockheed.

“Radar works analogous to a bat,” Lovick explains. “The bat squeaks and the
sound hits a bug. The squeak gets sent back to the bat and the bat measures time

and distance to the bug through the echo it receives.” So how does one get the
bug to absorb the squeak? “The way in which to solve the radar problem for us
at Lockheed was to create a surface that would redirect radar returns. We needed
to send them off in a direction other than back at the Soviet radars. We could
also do this by absorbing radar returns, like a diaper absorbs liquid. In theory it
was simple. But it turned out to be quite a complicated problem to solve.”

Lovick had been solving problems ever since he was a child growing up in
Falls City, Nebraska, during the Depression—for instance, the time he wanted to
learn to play the piano but did not want to disturb his family while he practiced.
“I took the piano apart and reconfigured its parts to suppress the sound. Then I
sent the vibrations from the strings electronically through a small amplifier to a
headset I wore.” This was hardly something most fourteen-vear-old children
were doing in 1933 . Four years later, at the age of eighteen, Lovick published his
first article on radar, for Radio-Craft magazine. Inspired to think he might have a
career in radar technology, he wrote to Lockheed Corporation in faraway
California asking for a job. Lockheed turned him down. So he took a minimum-
wage job as a radio repairman at a local Montgomery Ward, something that, at
the age of ninety-one, he still considers a serendipitous career move. “What I
learned at Montgomery Ward, in an employment capacity that today some might
perceive as a dead-end job, would later play an important role in my future spy
plane career.” Namely, that there is as much to learn from what doesn’t work as
from what does.

To learn how to outfox radar, Lovick returned to the trial-and-error principles
he’d first cultivated as a child. He set about designing and overseeing the
building of Lockheed’s first anechoic chamber to test scale models of Skunk
Works’ proposed new spy plane. “An anechoic chamber is an enclosed space
covered in energy-absorbing materials, the by-product of which is
noiselessness,” Lovick explains. It is so quiet inside the chamber that if a person
stands alone inside its four walls, he can hear the blood flowing inside his body.
“Particularly loud is the blood in one’s head,” Lovick notes. Only in such a
strictly controlled environment could the physicist and his team accurately test
how a one-twentieth-scale model would react to radar beams aimed at it.
Lockheed’s wood shop built tiny airplane models for the physicists, not unlike
the models kids play with. Lovick and the team painstakingly applied radar¬
absorbing material to the models then strung them up in the anechoic chamber to
test. Based on the radar echo results, the shape and design of the spy plane
would change. So would its name. Over the next several months, the design

numbers for the Archangel-1 went up incrementally, through eleven major
changes. This is why the final and official Agency designation for the airplane
was Archangel-12, or A-12 for short.

While imaging and then designing Lockheed’s new spy plane, Edward
Lovick accompanied Kelly Johnson on trips to Washington, DC. There, the men
met with Richard Bissell and President Eisenhower’s science advisers to deliver
progress reports and attend briefings on the aircraft. President Eisenhower called
it “the Big One.” On these trips to DC, Bissell, whom Lovick knew only as Mr.
B., would pepper Kelly Johnson with technical questions about stealth, or “low
observables,” which Lovick was responsible for answering. “We shared test data
from the chamber work, which was going along fine,” Lovick recalls. “But the
Customer always wanted better. No matter how low we felt our observables
were, the Customer always wanted them to be lower.” This meant more work. In
a final design stage, Skunk Works aerodynamicists and the radar team added
downward slopes, called chines, on either side of the body of the aircraft,
making the airplane look like a cobra with wings. With the plane’s underbelly
now flat, its radar cross section was reduced by an astonishing 90 percent. Still,
Richard Bissell wanted a spy plane closer to invisible. Lovick needed a full-scale
laboratory. Johnson got an idea: return to Area 51.

Johnson had met privately with an unnamed official to try to convince the
CIA to allow a small cadre of Lockheed scientists and engineers to return to
Area 51 for proof-of-concept tests. There and only there, Johnson argued, could
his group do what needed to be done to meet the CIA’s grueling radar-evasion
demands. During this intense design phase, and despite the secrecy of the
project, Lockheed was not the only contractor bidding on the job. Who exactly
would land the CIA’s contract to build the U-2’s replacement airplane was still
up in the air. The federal government liked to foster competition between
defense contractors, which meant aerospace contractor Convair was also in play,
hoping to secure the CIA’s hundred-million-dollar contract for itself. Johnson
knew reducing the aircraft’s observables was his best shot at getting the contract.
Permission was granted, and in the late summer of 1959, fifty Skunk Works
employees returned to Area 51 .

The days of measuring child-size airplane models in a tiny chamber in
Burbank were over. The time had come to put a full-scale model of the world’s
first stealth airplane to the test. “On 31 March we started to build a full scale
mockup and elevation device to raise the mockup 50 feet in the air for radar
tests,” Johnson wrote in documents declassified in July 2007. What Johnson was

imagining in this “elevation device” would eventually become the legendary
Area 51 pylon, or radar test pole.

Lockheed engineers brought with them a mock-up of the aircraft so detailed
that it could easily be mistaken for the real thing. For accurate radar results, the
model had to represent everything the real aircraft would be, from the size of the
rivets to the slope on the chines. It had taken more than four months to build.
When it was done, the wooden airplane, with its 102-foot-long fuselage and 55-
foot-long wooden wings, was packed up in a wooden crate in preparation for its
journey out to Area 51. Getting it there was a daunting task, and the road from
Burbank to Area 51 needed to be prepared in advance. The transport crate had
been disguised to look like a generic wide load, but the size made it considerably
wider than wide. Crews were dispatched before the trip to remove obstructing
road signs and to trim overhanging trees. In a few places along the highway, the
road had to be made level.

What kind of cleanup went on at Area 51 before the arrival of Lockheed’s
radar cross-section crew remains unknown. Twelve months had passed since the
last atomic bomb had been exploded next door; it was code-named Titania . like
the mischievous queen of the fairies from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. If there was a formal decontamination of Area 51 or a summation of
what the radiation levels were and whether it was safe to return, those details
remain classified. As it was, the radar test system Lockheed set up was only
temporary. The CIA did not yet have presidential approval to proceed with the
A-12. “I had no more than 50 people on the project,” Johnson wrote in a
document called History of the Oxcart by the Builder, declassified in 2007. The
small group of Skunk Workers bunked down in the Quonset huts where the U-2
pilots and engineers had once lived.

Beginning in the fall of 1959, a Lockheed C-47 shuttled engineers and
mechanics from Burbank to Area 51 on Monday mornings and returned them
home to their families late Friday afternoons. It was Ed Lovick’s first experience
working at what he’d been told was Paradise Ranch. Because of Lovick’s key
role in this phase of the project, he was transported in a Lockheed twin-engine
Cessna, usually alone with the pilot. He disliked the commute because the fumes
from the Cessna made him queasy. But once he arrived and deplaned he would
lose himself in the intensity of the radar work going on. In Burbank, in the
silence of the anechoic chamber, Lovick had been testing airplane models the
size of his shoe. This full-size mock-up would reveal the results of two years’
worth of chamber work. “The only way to get accurate information of how a

full-size aircraft would perform in radar testing was to subject the full size
mock-up of the A-12 to radar beams,” Lovick explains.

At the edge of the dry lake bed, scientists mounted the airplane on the fifty-
five-foot-high pole, centered in a concrete pad that would rise up and down from
an underground chamber in the desert floor. “A control room was located
underground to one side of the pad. An anemometer and a wind-direction
weather vane were located near the edge of the pad, away from the line of sight,”
Lovick recalls. The radar antennas, manned and monitored by EG&G, were
located a mile away from the pole. “The nose of the mock-up would be tipped
down so the radar would see the airplane’s belly, the same way that Soviet radar
would see it. It was an elaborate and time-consuming process,” Lovick recalls.
“The mock-up that was tested on the pole had to be housed in a hangar on the
base at least a mile away. It was carried out and back on special carts.”

In late 1959, the CIA did not know how far the Soviets had advanced their
satellite technology—whether they were capable of taking photographs from
space yet. The CIA’s espionage concerns further complicated the radar work at
Area 51. Each member of Lovick’s crew carried in his pocket a small chart
indicating Soviet satellite schedules. This often meant working odd hours,
including at night. “It also made for a lot of technicians running around,” Lovick
explains. “Satellites passed overhead often. Getting an aircraft up on the radar
test pole took eighteen minutes. It took another eighteen minutes to get it back
down. That left only a set amount of time to shoot radar at it and take data
recordings.” As soon as technicians were done, they took the aircraft down and
whisked it away into its hangar.

What Lovick remembered most about life on the Ranch during this period,
besides the work going on around the pole, was how intense the weather was. At
night, workers needed to bundle up in heavy coats and wool hats. But during the
day, temperatures could reach 120 degrees. “Once, I saw a coyote chasing a
rabbit and they were both walking,” Lovick recalls.

In December of 1959, the president was briefed on the status of the A-12.
Eager to move ahead, Eisenhower was also aware of the hundred-million-dollar
check he would be writing to Lockheed from his discretionary funds for a fleet
of twelve spy planes. Eisenhower told Bissell he had decided to request that
Lockheed deliver results on a last proof-of-concept test, one that focused
specifically on radar-evasion technology. Bissell had been informed that
Lockheed’s A-12 would appear on enemy radar as bigger than a bird but smaller
than a man. But he had not yet been told about a problem in the aircraft’s low

observables that Lovick and the team had been unable to remedy while testing
the mock-up out at Area 51. Lovick explains: “The exhaust ducts from the two
huge jet engines that powered the aircraft were proving impossible to make
stealthy. Obviously, we couldn’t cover the openings with camouflage coating.
During testing, the radar waves would go into the spaces where the engines
would be, echo around, and come out like water being sprayed into a can. We’d
tried screens and metallic grating. Nothing worked.” Kelly Johnson believed the
CIA would accept this design weakness. “Ike wants an airplane from Mandrake
the magician.” Johnson told the team and added that the president would settle
for something less. Johnson was wrong.

With the president’s final request on the table, settling for something less was
no longer an option. On a final trip to Washington, DC, Kelly Johnson was going
to have to explain to Bissell the exact nature of the design problem. “The
meeting took place at an old ramshackle building in Washington, DC, inside a
conference room with a mirrored wall,” Lovick remembers. “Killian and
[Edwin] Din Land were there, so was ‘Mr. B.’” Kelly Johnson told the CIA
about the problem with camouflaging the A-12’s engine exhaust, how it was a
weakness in the airplane’s overall concept of stealth. “Bissell became furious.
Throughout the process, I felt so comfortable working for Kelly, I don’t think I
realized how serious the situation was until that meeting. Bissell threatened to
cancel the entire contract if someone didn’t come up with a solution.” It was a
tense moment. “I knew that more than a hundred men had been lost trying to
look over the fence. Shot down over Russia, killed, or listed as missing in
training missions. I became aware there was a serious problem of information
gathering. Before that, most of my concerns were as a scientist in a lab. [In that
moment] I realized how poorly things were going in the world outside the lab.
How important this airplane was, and that problem with the engine exhaust
needed to be solved.”

There in the conference room, Edward Lovick decided to speak up about an
idea he had been considering for decades, “and that was how to ionize gas,” he
says, referring to the scientific process by which the electrical charge of an atom
is fundamentally changed. “I suggested that by adding the chemical compound
cesium to the fuel, the exhaust would be ionized, likely masking it from radar. I
had suggested cesium would be the best source of free electrons because, in the
gaseous state, it would be the easiest to ionize.” If this complicated ionization
worked—and Lovick believed it would—the results would be like putting a
sponge in a can and running a hose into it. Instead of being bounced back, the

radar return from the engines would be absorbed. “Bissell loved the idea,” says
Lovick, adding that the suggestion was endorsed heartily by several of the
customer’s consultants. An enthusiastic discussion ensued among the president’s
science advisers, whom Lovick sensed had very little understanding of what it
was he was proposing. In the end, the results would be up to Lovick to
determine; later, his theory indeed proved correct. Those results remain a key
component of stealth and are still classified as of 2011.

Lockheed kept the contract. Lovick got a huge Christmas bonus, and the A-
12 got a code name, Oxcart. It was ironic, an oxcart being one of the slowest
vehicles on Earth and the Oxcart being the fastest . On January 26, 1960, Bissell
notified Johnson that the CIA was authorizing the delivery of twelve airplanes.
The specs were laid out: Mach, 3.2 (2,064 knots, or .57 miles per second); range,
4,120 nautical miles; altitude, 84,500-97,600 feet. The aircraft was going to be
five times faster than the U-2 and would fly a full three miles higher than the U-
2. Skunk Works would move into production, and a facility needed to be readied
for flight tests. There was only one place equipped to handle a spy plane that
needed to be hidden from the world, including members of Congress, and that
was Area 51.

It was January of 1960, and for the first time since the atomic bombs had
shuttered the place, in the summer of 1957, Area 51 was back in business . Only
this time, the CIA and the Air Force were comanaging an aircraft that was
bigger, faster, and budgeted at nearly five times the cost of the U-2. The program
would involve more than ten times as many people, and, as it had with the U-2,
the CIA hired work crews from next door at the Nevada Test Site, men with top
secret security clearances already in place. There were two immediate
requirements for the new airplane: a much longer runway and a 1.32-million-
gallon fuel farm. The construction of a new runway and the fuel farm began first.
Millions of gallons of cement had to be hauled in, along with enough building
materials to constmct a small city. Trucking this kind of volume through the test
site would draw too much attention to the project, so a new road was built,
allowing access to Groom Lake from the north. Contractors worked under cover
of night, resurfacing eighteen miles of highway through the tiny town of Rachel,
Nevada, so fuel trucks carrying five hundred thousand gallons of specially
modified fuel each month would not crack the roadbed with their heavy loads.

The A-12 Oxcart was a flying fuel tank . It held eleven thousand gallons,

which made the tanks the largest portion of the airplane. The fuel had
requirements the likes of which were previously unknown. During the refueling
process, which would happen in the air, at lower altitudes and lower airspeeds,
the temperature of the fuel would drop to -90 degrees Fahrenheit. At Mach 3, it
would heat up to 285 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature at which conventional
fuels boil and explode. To allow for this kind of fluctuation, JP-7 was designed
to maintain such a low vapor pressure that a person could not light it with a
match. This made for many practical jokes, with those in the know dropping lit
matches into a barrel of JP-7 to make those not in the know duck and run for
cover. It also required extreme precision of the man who was chosen to be in
charge of the fuels team, Air Force sergeant Harry Martin.

This meant Martin was one of the first men to return to the nearly deserted
secret base. “Winters were freezing on Groom Lake,” Martin recalls, with
temperatures dropping into the low teens. “I lived in a dilapidated trailer heated
with kerosene. I’ve never worked so hard in my life as I did that first winter at
Area 51.” Martin had no idea what he was working on but gathered it was
important when he was woken up in the middle of the night by a two-star
general. “He said we had an important task. I thought to myself, ‘If a general is
up working at this hour, then I’m up too.’ Working at Area 51 was the highlight
of my career.”

The A-12 was original in every way, meaning it had unforeseen needs that
came up at every turn. The eighty-five-hundred-foot runway had to be created
piece by piece because the standard Air Force runways would not work when it
came to Oxcart. The longitudinal sections had to be made much larger, and the
joints holding them together needed to run parallel to the aircraft’s roll, not
horizontal, as was standard with Air Force planes. Large, new aircraft hangars
went into construction, ready to conceal what would become known as the CIA’s
“own little air force.” Getting the Oxcart to fly would involve its own small fleet
of aircraft: F-104 chase planes, proficiency-training airplanes, transport planes,
and a helicopter for search and rescue.

Because the Oxcart would fly five times as fast as the U-2, the Agency
needed a lot more restricted airspace at Area 51. Flying at speeds of 2,200 miles
per hour, an Oxcart pilot would need a 186-mile swath just to make a U-turn .
This meant an additional 38,400 acres of land around the base were withdrawn
from public access, allowing the Federal Aviation Administration to extend the
restricted airspace from a 50-square-mile box to 440 square miles. FAA
employees were instructed not to ask questions about anything flying above

forty thousand feet. The same was true at NORAD , the North American
Aerospace Defense Command.

While the base was being readied for delivery of the twelve aircraft, pole
testing continued on the lake bed at Area 51. All the while, the CIA feared the
Russians were watching from space. Across the world, at NII-88, Sergei Korolev
had designed a Soviet spy satellite called Object D, but the CIA did not know
what exactly it was capable of. Also under way was a follow-on espionage
platform called Zenit, a modified version of the Vostok spacecraft that had been
equipped with cameras to photograph American military installations from
space. The Russians took great delight in rubbing what they learned in the face
of the State Department. Once, using diplomatic channels, they passed a simple
sketch of the exact shape of Lockheed’s top secret airplane to the CIA, whose
employees were baffled as to how the enemy could have known such a thing, in
view of the fact that operations personnel had been very careful to avoid the
orbiting Soviet snoopers. Was there a double agent among them? The CIA, ever
paranoid about KGB infiltration, worried in private that there could be a spy
inside Area 51. Lovick finally figured it out: the Russians were using infrared
satellites. In the desert heat, which could reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit in the
summer, the mock-up of the aircraft left a heat signature as it sat on the tarmac
while technicians were waiting to hoist it up on the test pole. The sketch
reflected that.

While the Russians watched from space, the CIA continued to monitor and
translate the Soviets’ reaction to its aerial reconnaissance program. Memos from
Soviet chief marshal of artillery S. Varentsov revealed the Russians’ growing
furor over the speed at which the United States was advancing its spy planes.
Varentsov lamented that the Russians’ own program had barely moved beyond
technology from World War II. On the one hand, this was positive news for the
CIA. In the world of overhead espionage, the Russians had been forced into a
defensive posture. But it was also a double-edged sword. The Soviets couldn’t
advance their aerial reconnaissance program because so much of their efforts
went into advancing surface-to-air missile technology . If the capitalist foes were
going to continue to fly over Mother Russia, Nikita Khrushchev was hell-bent on
shooting them down.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Cat and Mouse Becomes Downfall

Francis Gary Powers never slept well the night before a mission flight. When
his 2:00 a.m. wake-up call came on May 1, 1960, Powers felt particularly
anxious. His flight had already been postponed twice. It was sweltering hot in
the ancient city of Peshawar, Pakistan, and Powers had spent the night on a cot
in an aircraft hangar inside the CIA’s secret facility there. Between the intense
heat and the noise, sleep had been sporadic. The false starts had added a layer of
uncertainty into the mix. Gary Powers got out of bed and took a shower. May
was the hottest month in Pakistan. It was before 5:00 a.m. and yet the sun was
already up, cooking the air. After only a few minutes, Powers would be drenched
in sweat again. He dressed and ate his breakfast, all the while thinking about the
radical mission that lay ahead. The Agency had never attempted to fly all the
way across the Soviet Union before, from the southern border near Pakistan to
the northern border near the Arctic Circle. From there, Powers would fly his U-2
to a secret CIA base in Norway and land. No Agency pilot had ever taken off and
landed at two different bases in a U-2.

This overflight was particularly important to the CIA. Powers would gather
valuable photographic information on two key sites. The first was the Tyuratam
Cosmodrome, the Soviets’ busiest missile launch base. Tyuratam was Russia’s
Cape Canaveral , the place from where Sputnik had been launched. For years the
CIA was aware of only one launchpad at Tyuratam. Now there were rumored to
be two, and a U-2 overflight in April revealed preparations for an upcoming
launch—of what exactly, the CIA wanted to know. After Tyuratam, Powers
would fly across Siberia and head up to a facility at Plesetsk . 186 miles south of
the city of Archangelsk, in the Arctic Circle. Plesetsk was alleged to be the

Soviet’s newest missile-launch facility and was dangerously close to Alaska.
Powers’s flight would cover a record 3,800 miles, 2,900 of which would be
inside the Soviet Union. He would spend nine nerve-racking hours over enemy
territory. That would be a lot of time for the Soviets to try to shoot him down.
The reverse would have been unthinkable. Imagine a Russian spy plane flying
unmolested over the entire United States, from the East Coast to the West,
snapping photographs that could provide details at two-and-a-half-foot
increments from seventy thousand feet up.

After breakfast, Powers sat in the hangar waiting for a final weather check.
He had already sweated through his long johns. Mother Nature always had the
final say. For Powers, a slight wind change meant the schedule for his mission
flight that morning was disrupted yet again. Not enough to cancel the mission,
but enough so that his navigational maps had to be quickly corrected. The
waiting was agonizing. It was also necessary. If his photographic targets were
covered in clouds, images from the U-2’s camera would be useless. The
navigators needed to calculate when and if the weather would clear. As Powers
sat waiting it out, his commanding officer, Colonel Shelton, crossed the cement
floor and indicated he wanted to speak with him .

Colonel Shelton extended his hand and opened his palm. At the center was a
large silver coin. “Do you want the silver dollar?” the colonel asked Powers.
What Shelton was offering was no ordinary American coin. It was a CIA suicide
gadget, designed to conceal a tiny poison pin hidden inside. The pin, which the
pilot could find in his pocket by rubbing a finger gently around the coin’s edge,
was coated with a sticky brown substance called curare, the paralytic poison
found in lethal Amazonian blowpipes. One prick of the poison pin and a pilot
would be dead in seconds.

Gary Powers was one of the Agency’s most accomplished U-2 pilots. He had
flown a total of twenty-seven missions, including ones over China. He had once
suffered a potentially fatal flameout over the Soviet Union and managed to
survive. On many occasions he had been offered the suicide pill, and on each
previous mission he had said no. But on May 1, 1960, Powers unexpectedly
accepted the pin from Colonel Shelton, then slid it into the pocket of his flight
suit. Later, Powers would wonder if he’d had a premonition of what was to
come.

At 5:20 a.m., it was go time. The personnel equipment sergeant strapped
Powers into the cockpit of the U-2. Two men held a shirt over Powers’s head to
protect him from the blaring sun and the heat while he went over radio codes

with the Agency officer. Pilots knew never to use their radio while flying over
denied territory, but they listened carefully for click codes being sent to them. A
single click meant proceed. Three clicks meant turn around and head back to
base. From under his heavy helmet, sweat poured down Powers’s face, making
him feel helpless. Finally Colonel Shelton came out for a briefing. Powers’s
overflight was now awaiting final approval by President Eisenhower himself. A
last-minute delay like this had never happened before and Powers became
convinced the flight would again be canceled for another day. Instead, at 6:20
a.m. a signal came from an intelligence officer. The two men who had been
holding the shirt over Powers’s head climbed down off the ladders; the personnel
equipment sergeant closed the canopy, sealing him into the airplane; and Gary
Powers was cleared for takeoff.

Up he went. After the U-2’s extraordinarily steep and fast climb, Powers
within minutes reached an altitude where it was 60 degrees below zero outside.
No longer sweating, Powers switched on the U-2 autopilot mechanism so he
could make notes in his flight log. Waiting was always a drag, offset
immediately by the excitement of being up in the air. Using a pen, Powers wrote:
“Aircraft #360, Sortie Number 4154, 0126 Greenwich Mean Time.” He listened
for the one-click signal over the radio, which would let him know he was good
to proceed. The click came. Powers settled in for what was supposed to be a total
of thirteen hours of flying time. His overflight would be the Agency’s deepest
penetration into the Soviet Union so far.

In Moscow, two thousand miles to the east, it was still dark outside when
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sat upright in bed, awakened by a ringing
telephone . Defense minister Marshal Malinovsky was on the line. A high-flying
aircraft had crossed the border over Afghanistan and was headed toward central
Russia, Malinovsky said. Khrushchev became enraged. Today of all days. May 1
was Russia’s national holiday. The streets were festooned with banners and
ribbons for the May Day parade. This could mean only one thing, Khrushchev
later told his son, Sergei. Eisenhower was ridiculing him again. The Soviet
premier’s Achilles’ heel was his lack of formal education; he’d dropped out of
school to work in the coal mines after the fourth grade. With his poor reading
and writing skills, Khrushchev hated feeling that a more educated world leader
was trying to make him appear the fool.

The Americans were especially duplicitous regarding holidays, Khrushchev
believed. Four years earlier, on the Fourth of July, the Americans had double-
crossed him with their first overflight of the U-2. If that overflight was a kick in

the ribs, today’s overflight was a sharp poke in the eye . “An uncomfortable
situation was shaping up.” Russian colonel Alexander Orlov explained in a
historical review of the incident written for the CIA in 1998. Orlov, who spent
most of his forty-six-year military career with Russia’s air defense force, had
been an eyewitness to the event; he was seated at the command post in Moscow
when Gary Powers was shot down. “The May Day parade was scheduled to get
underway at mid-morning and leaders of the party, the government and the
Armed Forces were to be present as usual,” Orlov explained. “In other words, at
a time when a major parade aimed at demonstrating Soviet military prowess was
about to begin, a not-yet-identified foreign aircraft was flying over the heart of
the country and Soviet air defenses appeared unable to shoot it down.”

Not if Khrushchev had his way. “Shoot down the plane by whatever means,”
he shouted back at his defense minister. All across the country, the Soviet Air
Force went on alert. Generals scrambled their fighter jets to go after Powers. In
Siberia, officers from Soviet Air Defense Forces were summoned to their
command posts with orders to shoot down the American spy. It was a matter of
national pride. The orders came from Nikita Khrushchev himself.

Tucked snugly into the tiny cockpit of his U-2, Gary Powers sailed along. He
was one and a half hours into his flight. The weather was proving to be worse
than expected but clicks on the radio system indicated that he was to proceed.
Over the majestic Hindu Kush mountain range, clouds rose all the way up to the
top of the twenty-five-thousand-foot peaks, and the cloud cover made it difficult
for Powers to determine exactly where he was on the map. Flying at seventy
thousand feet meant the sky above him was pitch-black. Under normal
circumstances he would have used the stars to determine where on the globe he
was, but today his celestial navigation computations were unreliable—they’d
been laid out for a 6:00 a.m. departure, not a 6:26 a.m. one. And so, with only a
compass and sextant to keep him on track, Powers flew on. Spotting a break in
the clouds, he determined his location to be just southeast of the Aral Sea, high
above present-day Uzbekistan. Thirty miles to the north lay Powers’s first target:
the Tyuratam Cosmodrome.

Realizing he was slightly off course, Powers was correcting back when
suddenly he spotted the condensation trail of a jet aircraft below him. “It was
moving fast, at supersonic speed, paralleling my course, though in the opposite
direction,” Powers explained in his memoir Operation Overflight, published in

1970. Five minutes passed and now he knew at least one MiG was on his tail.
Then he spotted another aircraft flying in the same direction as he was. “I was
sure now they were tracking me on radar, vectoring in and relaying my headings
to the aircraft” below him. But the MiG was so far below his U-2, it did not pose
a real threat. Protected by height, Powers flew on. He felt confident he was out
of harm’s way. First he passed over the Ural Mountains, once considered the
natural boundary between the East and the West. He headed on toward
Sverdlovsk, which was situated thirteen hundred miles inside Russia. Before the
Communists took over, Sverdlovsk was called Yekaterinburg. It was there in
1918 that Czar Nicholas II and his family were lined up against a kitchen wall
and shot, setting off the Communist Revolution that had made the Cold War a
reality. To the Communists, the city of Sverdlovsk played an important role in
the Soviet military-industrial complex, a place where tanks and rockets were
built. It was also home to the Soviets’ secret bioweapons program , which on the
date of Powers’s flight was not yet known to the CIA.

Nearing Sverdlovsk, Powers made a ninety-degree turn. He headed toward
what appeared to be an airfield not marked on his map. Suddenly, large
thunderclouds appeared, obscuring his view. He switched his cameras on.

Powers had no idea that he was about to photograph a secret facility called
Kyshtym 40, which produced nuclear material and also assembled weapons.
Kvshtvm 40 was as valuable to Russia as Los Alamos and Sandia combined
were to the Americans.

On the ground, a surface-to-air missile battalion tasked with guarding
Kyshtym 40 had been tracking Powers’s flight. At exactly 8:53 local time, the air
defense battalion commander there gave the official word. “Destroy target.” the
commander said. A missile from an SA-2 fired into the air at Mach 3. Inside his
airplane, Gary Powers was making notes for the official record—altitude, time,
instrument readings—when he suddenly felt a dull thump. All around him, his
plane became engulfed in a bright orange flash of light. “A violent movement
shook the plane, flinging me all over the cockpit,” Powers later wrote. “I
assumed both wings had come off. What was left of the plane began spinning,
only upside down, the nose pointing upward toward the sky.” As the U-2 spun
out of control, Powers’s pressure suit inflated, wedging him into the nose of the
airplane. The U-2 was crashing. He needed to get out. Thrown forward as he
was, if he pushed the button to engage the ejection seat, both of his legs would
be severed. Powers struggled, impossibly, against gravity. He needed to get out
of the airplane and he needed to hit the button that would trigger an explosion to

destroy the airplane once he was gone, but he was acutely aware that he couldn’t
get out of the airplane without cutting off his own legs. For a man who rarely felt
fear, Gary Powers was on the edge of panic.

Suddenly, out of the chaos, three words came to him: Stop and think. An old
pilot friend had once said that if he ever got in a jam, all he had to remember was
to “stop and think.” His thoughts traveled back to his old training days at Area
51, back when the U-2 didn’t have an ejection seat. Back when escaping from
the U-2 was the pilot’s job, not a mechanical one. Reaching up, Powers unlocked
the airplane canopy. It flew off and sailed into the darkness. Instantly, the
centrifugal force of the spinning airplane sucked him out into the atmosphere.

He was free at last; all he needed to do was deploy his parachute. Then, to his
horror, he realized that he was still attached to the airplane by his oxygen hoses.
Powers tried to think through his options, but the g-forces were too great. There
was nothing he could do anymore. His fate was out of his hands. He blacked out.

Nearly two thousand miles away, at a National Security Agency listening
post in Turkey, NS A operators eavesdropped on Soviet radar operators at
Kyshtym 40 as operators there tried to shoot Gary Powers’s U-2 out of the sky.
The NS A had participated in many U-2 missions before. It was their job to equip
CIA planes with listening systems, special recorders that gathered electronic
intelligence, or ELINT. The NS A operators knew something was wrong the
moment they heard a Soviet MiG pilot, the one who was chasing Powers from
below, talking to the missile operators at Kyshtym 40. “He’s turning left.” the
MiG pilot said, helping the missile operator to target Powers’s exact location.

Just a few moments later, NS A operators heard Kyshtym 40 say that Powers’s U-
2 had disappeared from their radar screens.

NS A immediately sent a message to the White House marked CRITIC.
Meanwhile, in the Soviet command post in Moscow, Russian colonel Alexander
Orlov received an urgent report from Siberia: the American spy plane had been
shot down. A missile had been fired and the target had disappeared from radar
screen. The news was phoned to Khrushchev, who demanded physical proof.

The White House sent a message to the CIA that was received by Bissell’s
special assistant, Bob King. “Bill Bailey did not come home” was how Richard
Bissell learned of the incident, in code.

Over Sverdlovsk, Francis Gary Powers was free-falling through the
atmosphere. Somehow, he had detached from the spinning airplane. “My body
[was] just falling perfectly free. It was a pleasant, exhilarating feeling,” Powers
would later recall. It felt “even better than floating in a swimming pool.” His

parachute deployed, and Powers floated into a wide, grassy field. His thoughts
during the last ten thousand feet before the ground were sharp and clear.
“Everything was cold, quiet, serene. There was no sensation of falling. It was as
if I were hanging in the sky.” A large section of the aircraft floated by, “twisting
and fluttering like a leaf.” Below him, the countryside looked beautiful. There
were forests, lakes, roads, and small villages. The landscape reminded him of
Virginia in the spring. As Powers floated down toward Earth, he noticed a small
car driving down a dirt road alongside him, as if following his course. Finally, he
made contact with the ground. The car stopped and men were helping him. One
assisted with his chute. Another man helped him to his feet. A third man reached
over to Powers’s survival pack and took his pistol. A crowd of approximately
fifty people had gathered around. The men motioned for Powers to follow them.
They loaded him into the front seat of a tmck and began driving.

The men seemed friendly. One of them offered Powers a cigarette. The
emblem on the cigarette pack was that of a dog. Taking it, Powers realized the
incredible irony of it all. The brand was Laika . and its emblem was the world’s
first space dog. Laika had flown inside Sputnik 2, the second Russian satellite to
be launched from the Tyuratam Cosmodrome, the CIA target that Powers had
photographed a little over an hour before. Gary Powers sat back and smoked the
cigarette, noting how remarkably like an American cigarette it was.

With the U-2 spy plane and the SA-2 missile system, the Americans and the
Soviets had been playing a game of cat and mouse: constant pursuit, near
captures, and repeated escapes. Now that game was over. Powers, like the
mouse, had been caught. But there was a second, even greater catastrophe in the
works. When the White House staff learned Powers’s U-2 had been shot down,
they assumed he was dead. This was an assumption based on CIA “facts.”
Richard Bissell had personally assured the president that in the unlikely event
that an SA-2 missile was able to reach a U-2 and shoot it down, the pilot would
not survive. “ We believed that if a U-2 was shot down over Soviet territory, all
the Russians would have was the wreckage of an aircraft,” Bissell later
explained. And so, believing Gary Powers was dead, the White House denied
that the airplane was on any kind of espionage mission, in opposition to
Khrushchev’s very public accusation. For five days, the White House claimed
that Gary Powers had been gathering high-altitude weather data for the National
Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA.

But Khrushchev had evidence , which he would soon make public. With great
bravado , on May 5, he gathered all thirteen hundred members of the Soviet
parliament inside the Great Kremlin Palace speaking hall and addressed them
from the stage. The United States has been making a fool of Mother Russia,
Khrushchev declared. The Americans had been sending spy planes over the
Soviet Union for nearly four years. To underscore the significance of what had
happened, Khrushchev gave a bold analogy. “Just imagine what would have
happened had a Soviet aircraft appeared over New York, Chicago or Detroit?
That would mean the outbreak of war!” Amid gasps of horror, Khrushchev
explained how the Soviet Union had first used diplomatic channels to protest the
spy flights. That he had called upon the U.N. Security Council to take action, but
nothing was done. Just four days earlier, Khrushchev explained, on May 1, yet
another illegal espionage mission had occurred. Only this time the Soviets had
succeeded in shooting down the spy plane. The audience broke into wild cheers.
Then came the heart of the matter in the form of a question. It was also
Khrushchev’s bait. “Who sent this aircraft across the Soviet frontier?” he asked.
“Was it the American Commander-in-Chief who, as everyone knows, is the
president? Or was this aggressive act performed by Pentagon militarists without
the president’s knowledge? If American military men can take such action on
their own, the world should be greatly concerned.” By now, Khrushchev’s
audience members were stomping their feet.

Halfway across the world, President Eisenhower continued to have no idea
that Gary Powers was alive and had been talking to his captors. All the White
House and the CIA knew was that the Soviets had a wrecked U-2 in their
possession. Khrushchev had laid a dangerous trap, one in which President
Eisenhower got caught. The White House sent its press officer Walter Bonney to
the press room to greet journalists and to tell the nation a lie. Gary Powers’s
weather-sampling airplane was supposed to be flying over Turkey. Instead, it had
gone astray. Two days later, on May 7, Khrushchev sprung his trap. “Comrades,”
he told the parliament, who’d been gathered for a second revelatory speech. “I
must let you in on a secret.” He smiled. “When I made my report two days ago I
deliberately refrained from mentioning that we have the remains of the plane and
we also have the pilot who is quite alive and kicking,” Khrushchev said. For the
United States, it was a diplomatic disaster of the worst order.

The president was trapped. Were he to deny knowing what his “militarists”
were up to, he would appear uninformed by his own military. Were he to admit
that he had in fact personally authorized Powers’s flight, it would become clear

he’d lied earlier when he claimed the downed airplane had been conducting
weather research, not espionage. So despondent was the commander in chief
about his untenable position that when he walked into the Oval Office two days
later, he told his secretary Ann Whitman, “I would like to resign.” Spying on
Russia and defying Soviet airspace was one thing; lying about it after being
caught red-handed made the president look like a liar in the eyes of the world. In
1960, American presidents were expected to be truth tellers; there was no public
precedent for lying.

Khrushchev demanded an apology from his nemesis. Eisenhower wouldn’t
bow . Apologizing would only open Pandora’s box. There were too many
overflights to make them transparent. There had been at least twenty-four U-2
flights over Russia and hundreds more bomber overflights by General LeMay.

To reveal the dangerous game of cat and mouse that had been going on in secret
—at a time when thermonuclear weapons on both sides were ready to fly—
would likely shock and frighten people more than having a president who lied. A
national poll revealed that more than half of adult Americans believed they were
more likely to die in a thermonuclear war with the Russians than of old age. So
Eisenhower made the decision to keep the focus on Gary Powers’s flight only
and admit that he personally had authorized it. This was “ the first time any
nation had publicly admitted it was engaged in espionage,” noted Eisenhower’s
lead U-2 photo interpreter at the time, Dino Brugioni.

Khrushchev could play the game too. And he did so by making a dangerous,
offensive move. By the summer of 1960, he had authorized a Soviet military
base to be set up in Cuba. The island, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida,
was in America’s backyard. Khrushchev’s plan was to put nuclear warheads in
striking distance of Washington, DC. In this way, Soviet missiles could be
launched from Havana and obliterate the nation’s capital in just twenty-five
minutes’ time . Khrushchev was showing Eisenhower that he could play cat and
mouse too.

Immediately after Gary Powers had been shot down in his U-2 and picked up by
the Soviets, he was flown from Sverdlovsk to Moscow, where he was put in a
cell inside Lubyanka Prison, which doubled as headquarters for the KGB. There,
his interrogation began. Powers had already decided on a tactic. He’d tell the
Russians the truth, but “with definite limitation.” The KGB wanted to know
about Area 51. Where had he trained to fly the U-2? Powers was asked.
According to Powers’s memoir, he told the KGB that training took place at a
base on the West Coast called Watertown. Powers wrote that the Soviets

believed Watertown was located in Arizona and that they produced a map of the
state, asking him to mark Watertown’s exact location. Whether the Soviets were
playing a game with Powers or whether he was telling his readers the truth but
“with definite limitation” remains unclear. Either way, trial transcripts from
August of 1960, declassified by the CIA in 1985, revealed that the Soviets knew
exactly where Watertown was and that it was located inside the Nevada Test
Site. During Powers’s trial . Soviet procurator-general Rudenko asked his
comrade judges if they were familiar with “the deposition of the accused Powers
which he gave in the preliminary investigations and here in court on the
preparations for flights in the U-2 aircraft at the Las Vegas firing range fpoligonl
in the Nevada desert .” and then he fingered the base as being used by the CIA
for “the training in the use of special reconnaissance aircraft.” Not before the
publication of this book has it been understood that the KGB clearly knew about
Area 51 during the Powers trial.

Further, the trial revealed that the Soviets also had a much clearer picture of
the inner workings of the American military-industrial complex and its defense¬
contracting system than the CIA had previously known. Rudenko was able to
name “Lockheed company” as the manufacturer of the U-2. He argued that the
existence of the “Las Vegas firing range,” aka Area 51, and the Lockheed spy
plane exemplified what he called a “criminal conspiracy” between “a major
American capitalist company, an espionage and reconnaissance center, and the
military of America.” In his speech to the USSR International Affairs
Committee, Rudenko had correctly identified the three players in the triangle of
Area 51: defense contractors, the intelligence community, and the Pentagon.

After a three-day trial, the Soviets determined that Gary Powers, having been
caught spying on Russia, exposed the United States for what it really was: “an
enemy of the peace.” Powers was sentenced to ten years in prison. President
Eisenhower was judged to be a “follower of Hitler.” the lowest insult in the
Russian lexicon. Hitler had double-crossed Khrushchev’s predecessor, Joseph
Stalin, in 1941, and the result of that double cross was twenty million Russians
dead. In comparing Eisenhower to Hitler, Khrushchev was sending a clear
message: diplomacy was off the table. The upcoming east-west summit in Paris
was canceled. How bad could things get?

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics issued a press release
identifying Watertown as the U-2 training facility but stating falsely that it was
no longer used as a training base. The Russians knew that statement was meant
to mislead the American public and not Russia’s intelligence service, the KGB—

and the CIA knew the Soviets had first-person information about Area 51 in the
form of Gary Powers, not just photographic images of the facility from the
satellites they’d been sending overhead.

With the White House absorbing the fallout from the Gary Powers affair, the
CIA and the Air Force were deeply involved in the Mach 3 replacement for the
U-2 out at the Ranch . The 8,500-foot-long runway, designated 14/32 and
believed to be the longest in the world, had been finished, complete with a two-
mile semicircular extension called the Hook, which would allow an A-12 pilot
extra room for maneuvering were he to overshoot the runway. Four new aircraft
hangars were built, designated 4, 5, 6, and 7. The former U-2 hangars whose
metal doors had buckled in the atomic blast were converted into maintenance
facilities and machine shops. Navy housing units, 140 in all, were transported to
the base and laid out in neat rows. The commissary was expanded, as was the
movie house and fire station. Richard Bissell had a tennis court put in . and plans
for an Olympic-size swimming pool were drawn. The airspace over the entire
region was given its own designation, R-4808N, separate from what had
previously been designated Prohibited Area P-275 : it included the Nevada Test
Site, Area 13, and Area 51. All the CIA was waiting for was Lockheed’s delivery
of the A-12 airplanes.

At Lockheed, each Mach 3 aircraft was literally being hand forged, part by
part, one airplane at a time. The production of the aircraft, according to Richard
Bissell, “spawned its own industrial base. Special tools had to be developed,
along with new paints, chemicals, wires, oils, engines, fuel, even special
titanium screws. By the time Lockheed finished building the A-12, they
themselves had developed and manufactured thirteen million different parts .” It
was the titanium that first held everything up . Titanium was the only metal
strong enough to handle the kind of heat the Mach 3 aircraft would have to
endure: 500- to 600-degree temperatures on the fuselage’s skin and nearly 1,000
degrees in places close to the engines. This meant the titanium alloy had to be
pure; nearly 95 percent of what Lockheed initially received had to be rejected.
Titanium was also critically sensitive to the chemical chlorine, a fact Lockheed
engineers did not realize at first. During the summer, when chlorine levels in the
Burbank water system were elevated to fight algae, inside the Skunk Works,
airplane pieces started to mysteriously corrode. Eventually, the problem was
discovered, and the entire Skunk Works crew had to switch over to distilled

water. Next it was discovered that titanium was also sensitive to cadmium, which
was what most of Lockheed’s tools were plated with. Hundreds of toolboxes had
to be reconfigured, thousands of tools tossed out. The next problem was power
related. Wind-tunnel testing in Burbank was draining too much electricity off the
local grid. If a reporter found out about the electricity drain, it could lead to
unwanted questions. NASA offered Kelly Johnson an alternative wind-tunnel
test facility up in Northern California, near the Mojave, which was where
Lockheed engineers ended up—performing their tests late at night under cover
of darkness. The complicated nature of all things Oxcart pushed the new spy
plane further and further behind the schedule.

At Area 51, the concern continued to be stealth. The radar results from the
pole tests were promising, but as the Oxcart advanced, so did Soviet
countermeasures to shoot it down. Russia was spending billions of rubles on
surface-to-air missile technology and the CIA soon learned that the Oxcart’s new
nemesis was a system called Tall King. Getting hard data on Tall King’s exact
capabilities before the Oxcart went anywhere near it was now a top priority for
the CIA.

To understand countermeasures, the CIA initiated an esoteric research-and-
development program called Project Palladium. The program would get its legs
over Cuba and eventually move to Area 51. It would involve ELINT. In 1960,
“there were many CIA officers who thought ELINT was a dirty word .” recalls
Gene Poteat, the engineer in charge of Project Palladium, which originated with
the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence. Poteat was one of the early pioneers
who helped change that perception inside the CIA. “We needed to know the
sensitivity of Soviet radar receivers and the proficiency of its operators,” Poteat
explains. With Khrushchev using Cuba as a military base in the Western
Hemisphere, the CIA saw an opportunity. “When the Soviets moved into Cuba
with their missiles and associated radar, we were presented with a golden
opportunity to measure the system sensitivity of the SA-2 aircraft missile radar,”
says Poteat. To do this, the CIA needed a brigade of missile wizards. This
included men like T. D. Barnes.

Thornton “T.D.” Barnes was a CIA asset at an age when most men hadn’t
graduated from college yet. Married at seventeen to his high-school sweetheart,
Doris, Barnes became a self-taught electronics wizard, buying broken television
sets, fixing them up, and reselling them for five times the amount. In doing so,

he went from bitter poverty—raised on a Texas Panhandle ranch with no
electricity or running water—to buying his new bride a dream home before he
was old enough to vote. Barnes credited his mother for his becoming one of the
CIA’s most important radar countermeasure experts. “My mom saw an article on
radar in Life magazine when I was no more than nine or ten. She said I should
write a school report on the subject and so I did. That’s when I got bit with the
radar bug.”

At age seventeen, Barnes lied about his age to join the National Guard so he
could go fight in Korea. He dreamed of one day being an Army officer. Two
years later he was deployed to the 38th Parallel to defend the region alongside a
British and a Turkish infantry company. It was in Korea that Barnes began his
intelligence career at the bottom of the chain of command. “I was the guy who
sat on the top of the hill and looked for enemy soldiers. If I saw ’em coming, it
was my job to radio the information back to base,” Barnes recalls. He loved the
Army. The things he learned there stayed with him all his life: “Never waste a
moment. Shine your boots when you’re sitting on the pot. Always go to funerals.
Look out for your men.” Once, in Korea, a wounded soldier was rushed onto the
base. Barnes overheard that the man needed to be driven to the hospital, but
because gas was scarce, all vehicles had to be signed out by a superior. With no
superior around, Barnes worried the man might die if he didn’t get help fast, so
he signed his superior’s name on the order. “I was willing to take the demerit,”
Barnes explains. His actions caught the attention of the highest-ranking officer
on the base, Major General Carl Jark, and later earned him a meritorious award.
When the war was over General Jark pointed Barnes in the direction of radar and
electronics. “He suggested I go to Fort Bliss and get myself an education there,”
Barnes explains. So T.D. and Doris Barnes headed to Texas. There, Barnes’s
whole world would change. And it didn’t take long for his exceptional talents to
come to the attention of the CIA.

Barnes loved learning. At Fort Bliss, he attended classes for Nike Ajax and
Nike Hercules missile school by day and classes at Texas Western University by
night for the next fifty-four months. These were the missiles that had been
developed a decade earlier by the Paperclip scientists, born originally of the
German V-2 rocket. At Fort Bliss, Barnes read technical papers authored by
former Nazi scientists. Sometimes the Paperclip scientists taught class. “No one
really thought of them as former Nazis,” says Barnes. “They were the experts.
They worked for us now and we learned from them.” By early 1960, Barnes was
a bona fide missile expert. Sometimes, when a missile misfired over at the White

Sands Missile Range, it was T.D. Barnes who was dispatched to disarm the
missile sitting on the test stand. “I’d march up to the missile, take off the panel,
and disconnect the wires from the igniter,” Barnes recalls. “When you are young,
it doesn’t occur to you how dangerous something is.” Between the academics
and the hands-on experience, Barnes developed an unusual aptitude in an
esoteric field that the CIA was just getting involved in: ELINT. Which was how
at the age of twenty-three, T. D. Barnes was recruited by the CIA to participate
in a top secret game of chicken with the Russians that was part of Project
Palladium. Although Barnes didn’t know it then, the work he was doing was for
the electronic countermeasure systems that would later be installed on the A-12
Oxcart and on the ground at Area 51.

American military aviation began at the Fort Bliss airfield in 1916, when the
First Aero Squadron used it as a staging base while hunting Pancho Villa in
nearby Mexico. Now, almost half a century later, the airfield, called Biggs, was
part of the Strategic Air Command and served as home base for heavy bombers
like the B-52 Stratofortress. Beginning in 1960, the facility was also a staging
area for secret CIA missions that were part of Project Palladium, and that same
year, T. D. Barnes found himself standing on the tarmac at Biggs Airfield
watching a group of airmen as they delicately loaded a Hawk missile into the
cargo bay of an airplane. Weapons are supposed to go in the weapons bay,

Barnes thought to himself. But the project Barnes was participating in was
unusual, dangerous, and top secret. Barnes did not have a need-to-know what the
big picture involved and he knew better than to ask. Instead, he climbed into the
cargo bay and sat down beside the missile. “We had the nose cone off and part of
the skin off too. The missile was loaded on a stand inside the plane. It was my
job to watch the electronics respond,” Barnes explains. The airplane and its crew
took off from the airbase and headed for Cuba. The plan was for the airplane to
fly right up to the edge of Cuban airspace but not into it. Moments before the
airplane crossed into Cuban airspace, the pilot would quickly turn around and
head home. By then, the Russian radar experts working the Cuban radar sites
would have turned on their systems to track the U.S. airplane. Russian MiG
fighter jets would be sent aloft to respond. The job of Project Palladium was to
gather the electronic intelligence being sent out by the radar stations and the
MiGs. That was the first step in figuring out how to create a jamming system for
the A-12 at Area 51.

The Cubans and their Russian patrons could not have had any idea whether
the Americans were playing another game of chicken or if this act meant war.

“Soviet MiGs would scramble toward us,” Barnes recalls. “At the time, ECM
[electronic countermeasure] and ECCM [electronic counter-countermeasure]
technology were still new to both the plane and the missile. We’d transmit a
Doppler signal from a radar simulator which told their MiG pilots that a missile
had locked on them. When the Soviet pilots engaged their ECM against us, my
job was to sit there and watch how our missile’s ECCM responded. If the Soviet
signal jammed our missile and made it drift off target, I’d tweak my missile’s
ECCM electronics to determine what would override a Soviet ECM signal.”
Though primitive by today’s standards, what Barnes and the NS A agents with
him inside the aircraft did laid the early groundwork for electronic warfare today.
“Inside the airplane, we’d record the frequencies to be replayed back at Fort
Bliss for training and design. Once we got what we wanted we hauled ass out of
the area to avoid actual contact with Soviet planes.”

The info that Barnes and his colleagues were getting over Cuba was filling in
gaps that had previously been unknown. Back at Fort Bliss, Barnes and the
others would interpret what NS A had captured from the Soviet/Cuban ECM
transmissions that they had recorded during the flight. In listening to the
decrypted Soviet responses to the antagonistic moves, the CIA learned what the
Soviets could and could not see on their radars. This technology became a major
component in further developing stealth technology and electronic
countermeasures and was why Barnes was later placed by the CIA to work at
Area 51. For the U.S. Air Force, this marked the beginning of a new age of
information warfare.

Even though the U.S. military airplane with a team of engineers, NS A agents,
and a Hawk missile hidden inside would U-turn and fly away at the last moment,
just before violating Cuban airspace, “there were repercussions,” according to
Barnes. “It scared the living daylights out of them and it escalated things.” In
January of 1961, Khrushchev gathered a group of Cuban diplomats at their
embassy in Moscow. “Alarming news is coming from Cuba at present, news that
the most aggressive American monopolists are preparing a direct attack on
Cuba,” Khrushchev told the group. Barnes believes Khrushchev “may have been
referring to our messing with them with our Hawk missiles homing in on their
planes.” Were that the case, Khrushchev had a valid point. But the mercurial
dictator had his own difficulties in sticking to the facts. Disinformation was a
hallmark of the Soviet propaganda machine.

To a roomful of Cuban diplomats, many of whom knew otherwise,
Khrushchev falsely claimed, “What is more, [the Americans] are trying to

present the case as though rocket bases of the Soviet Union are being set up or
are already established in Cuba. It is well known that this is foul slander. There
is no Soviet military base in Cuba.” Actually, this is exactly what the Soviets
were doing. “Of course we knew better, and on January 3, 1961, severed all
diplomatic ties with Cuba,” Barnes explains.

Ten days later, the CIA convened its Special Group, a secret committee inside
the National Security Council that had oversight regarding CIA covert activities.
A formal decision was made that Castro’s regime “must be overthrown.” The
man in charge of making sure this happened was Richard Bissell. In addition to
being the highest-ranking CIA officer in the Special Operations Group, Bissell
was also the most trusted CIA officer in the eyes of John F. Kennedy, the dashing
new president. Before taking office, a member of the White House transition
team asked Kennedy who he trusted most in the intelligence community.
“Richard Bissell.” Kennedy said without missing a beat.

Bissell’s official title was now deputy director of plans. As innocuous as it
sounded, DDP was in fact a euphemism for chief of covert operations for the
CIA. This meant Bissell was in charge of the Agency’s clandestine service, its
paramilitary operations. The office had previously been known as the Office of
Policy Coordination, or OPC. As deputy director of plans, Richard Bissell would
be doing a lot more than playing a gentleman’s spy game from the air. The CIA’s
paramilitary operations spilled blood. During these covert anti-Communist
operations, men were dying in droves from Hungary to Greece to Iran, and all of
these operations had to be planned, staged, and approved by the deputy director
of plans.

In such a position there was writing on the wall, script that Richard Bissell
did not, or chose not to, see. The man he was replacing was Frank Wisner, his
old friend and the man who first introduced Bissell to the CIA. It was Frank
Wisner who’d knocked on Bissell’s door unannounced and then spent a fireside
evening in Bissell’s Washington, DC, parlor eleven years before. It was Wisner
who had originally asked Bissell to siphon off funds from the Marshall Plan and
hand them over to the CIA, no questions asked. Wisner had served the Agency
as deputy director of plans from August 1951 to January 1959, but by the end of
the summer of 1958, the job proved too psychologically challenging for him—
Frank Wisner had begun displaying the first signs of madness. The diagnosis
was psychotic mania, according to author Tim Weiner. Doctors and drugs did not
help. Next came the electroshock treatment: “For six months, his head was
clamped into a vise and shot through with a current sufficient to fire a hundred-

watt light bulb.” Frank Wisner emerged from the insane asylum zombielike and
went on to serve as the CIA’s London station chief. A broken man, Wisner did
not last long overseas. He shuffled in and out of mad-houses for years until
finally forced to retire in 1962: “He’d been raving about Adolf Hitler, seeing
things, hearing voices. He knew he would never be well.” Tragically, on October
29, 1965, Wisner was getting ready to go hunting with his old CIA friend Joe
Bryan at his country estate when he took a shotgun out of his gun cabinet and
put a bullet in his own head .

The pressure that came with being the deputy director of plans for the CIA
was, for some, as treacherous as a loaded gun.

As workers toiled away at Area 51 getting ready for the arrival of the Oxcart spy
plane, Richard Bissell focused on his orders to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro. By
1961, the Agency decided that Bahia de Cochinos, or the Bay of Pigs , was the
perfect place to launch its “paramilitary plan.” The little sliver of coastline on the
south shore of the island was barely inhabited. A few summer cottages were
scattered among little bays, used mostly for fishing and swimming, and there
was a valuable asset nearby in “an airstrip not far from the beach.”

Surely, the U-2 spy plane could help in gathering intel . Bissell decided. After
Gary Powers was shot down, President Eisenhower had promised the world
there would be no spy missions over Russia, but that promise did not include
dangerous Soviet proxies like Cuba. In his new position as deputy director of
plans, Bissell had used the U-2 to gather intelligence before. Its photographs had
been helpful in planning paramilitary operations in Laos and the Dominican
Republic. And in Cuba, overhead photographs taken by the Agency’s U-2s
revealed important details regarding the terrain just up the beach from the Bay of
Pigs beach. Photo interpreters determined that the swampland in the area would
be hard to run in unless the commandos familiarized themselves with preexisting
trails. As for the water landing itself, from seventy thousand feet in the air, the
beachhead at the Bay of Pigs looked flat and lovely. But because cameras could
not photograph what lay underwater, Bissell had no idea that just beneath the
surface of the sea there was a deadly coral reef that would later greatly impede
the water landing by commandos.

Hundreds of pages, declassified after thirty years, reveal the hand of
economics wizard Richard Bissell in the design of the paramilitary operation.
Bissell painstakingly outlined: “Contingency Plans... Probabilities...

Likelihood, chance of success... Plans for Operation ‘T,’... Operation ‘Z,’...
Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3... Pre-Day Day plans... D-Day plans... Post D-
Day plans... Unattributable actions by the Navy... Post-Recognition Plans...
Arguments for maximum sabotage... Arguments for simultaneous defection...
Feasibility of declaration of war by certain Central American states...
Disclosures... Non-Disclosures... Continuation of Psychological Warfare
Plans... How to deal, and how not to deal with the press.” For ah the
organization and preplanning, the operation might have been successful. But
there are many reasons why it failed so tragically. When the Bay of Pigs
operation was over, hundreds of CIA-trained, anti-Castro Cuban exiles were
killed on approach or left to die on the beachhead at the Bay of Pigs. Those that
lived to surrender were imprisoned and later ransomed back to the United States.
When the story became public, so did brigade commander Pepe San Roman’s
last words before his capture: “Must have air support in the next few hours or we
will be wiped out. Under heavy attacks by MiG jets and heavy tanks.” Pepe San
Roman begged Richard Bissell for help. “A11 groups demoralized... They
consider themselves deceived.” By the end of the day, Richard Bissell’s world
had begun to fall irreparably apart. The Bay of Pigs would be his downfall.

There was plenty of blame to go around but almost ah of it fell at the feet of
the CIA. In the years since, it has become clear that equal blame should be
imputed to the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and President
Kennedy. Shortly before he died, Richard Bissell blamed the mission’s failure on
his old rival General Curtis LeMav . Bissell lamented that if LeMav had provided
adequate air cover as he had promised, the mission would most likely have been
a success. The Pentagon has historically attributed LeMay’s failure to send B-26
bombers to the Bay of Pigs to a “time zone confusion.” Bissell saw the mix-up
as personal, believing that LeMay had been motivated by revenge. That he’d
harbored a grudge against Bissell for the U-2 and Area 51. Whatever the reason,
more than three hundred people were dead and 1,189 anti-Castro guerrillas, left
high and dry, had been imprisoned. The rivalry between Bissell and LeMay was
over, and the Bay of Pigs would force Richard Bissell to leave government
service in February of 1962. There were many government backlashes as a result
of the fiasco. One has been kept secret until now, namely that President Kennedy
sent the CIA’s inspector general at the time, Lyman B. Kirkpatrick Jr, , out to
Area 51 to write up a report on the base. More specifically, the president wanted
to assess what other Richard Bissell disasters in the making might be coming
down the pipeline at Area 51.

Adding friction to an already charged situation was the fact that by some
accounts, Kirkpatrick held a grudge. Before the Bay of Pigs, Richard Bissell was
in line to succeed Allen Dulles as director of the CIA, and eight years earlier,
Lyman Kirkpatrick had worn those coveted shoes. But like Bissell, Kirkpatrick
was cut down in his prime. Kirkpatrick’s loss came not by his own actions but by
a tragic blow beyond his control. On an Agency mission to Asia in 1952, Lyman
Kirkpatrick contracted polio and became paralyzed from the waist down.
Confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, Kirkpatrick was relegated to the
role of second-tier bureaucrat .

In a world of gentlemen spy craft and high-technology espionage,
bureaucracy was considered glorified janitorial work. But when Kirkpatrick was
dispatched to Area 51 by JFK, the fate and future of the secret base Richard
Bissell had built in the Nevada desert lay in Lyman Kirkpatrick’s hands.

CHAPTER NINE

The Base Builds Back Up

As the man in charge of property control at Area 51 . Jim Freedman was a
taskmaster. “It was my job to provide services for all the different groups at the
area,” Freedman explains. “This included the CIA, the Air Force, EG&G,
REECo [Reynolds Electric and Engineering], and even Howard Hughes—an
individual who very few people had any idea had his own hangar out at the
Ranch.” What exactly Hughes was doing at Area 51 remains classified as of
2011, but Freedman explains the dynamic that was at play. “The CIA liked to
foster competition between groups. It was why we had Kodak and Polaroid,
Lockheed and North American, EG&G and Hughes. They were all no-bid
contracts for security reasons. But competition keeps people on their toes.” Jim
Freedman acted as the gofer among the groups from 1960 until 1974. If a
scientist needed a widget, if an engineer needed an oscilloscope, or if a radar
expert needed a piece of magnetic tape, it was Freedman’s job to get it, fast. As a
prerequisite for the job, Freedman knew how to keep secrets. He carried a top
secret and a Q clearance and had worked for EG&G since 1953. “We worked
under a code that said, 'What you learn here, leave here.’ That was pretty simple
to follow,” says Freedman. “You couldn’t afford to talk. You’d lose your job and
you’d be blackballed. So instead, my wife and family thought I fixed TVs. 'How
was your day, Dad?’ my kids would ask when I got home. ‘Great!’ I’d say. 'I
fixed twenty-four TVs.’”

As they had been with the Manhattan Project, the various jobs going on at
Area 51 were compartmentalized for Oxcart, so that every person worked within
very strict need-to-know protocols. The radar people had no idea about the
ELINT people, who had no idea what any of the search-and-rescue teams were

up to. Each group worked on its part of the puzzle. Each man was familiar with
his single piece. Only a few individuals, officers working in managerial
capacities, understood a corner of the puzzle—at most. But someone had to act
as a go-between among these disparate groups, and in this way, Freedman
became an individual who knew a lot more than most about the inner workings
of Area 51.

He also knew the layout of the base. Most Area 51 workers were confined to
the building, or buildings, they worked in, the building they slept in, and the
mess hall, where everybody dined together. As the Area 51 runner, Freedman
“went to places out there that I don’t think other people even knew were out
there.” For example, Freedman says, there was “the faraway runway where
people who were not supposed to be seen by others were brought into the base.”
Freedman tells a story of one such group, the exact date of which he can’t recall
but that was during the Vietnam War. “One day I was out there delivering
something to someone, it was three in the morning, and I watched an airplane
land. Then I watched forty-one Vietnamese men get off the plane. I never saw
the men again, but a few days later I was sent on an errand. My supervisor said,
‘Jim, can you go to Fas Vegas and get me x number of pounds of a special kind
of rice?’ I’d say it was fairly obvious who that rice was being requested for.”
Freedman elaborates: “These [foreign nationals] were being trained to use state-
of-the-art Agency equipment out at the Area, which they probably took with
them when they left and went and put behind enemy lines.”

Freedman’s first job at the test site had been installing radios in EG&G
vehicles used during weapons tests. Next, he was trained as an engineer in the art
of wiring nuclear bombs. In the 1950s, Freedman participated in dozens of
nuclear tests on the arming and firing party alongside A1 O’Donnell at the test
site and also at the Pacific Proving Ground. “I even managed to survive a
helicopter crash in the Marshall Islands,” Freedman adds. In 1957, EG&G
learned that Freedman had studied photography after high school and assigned
him to a team photographing nuclear explosions. But by 1960, the nuclear-test-
ban treaty was in effect, testing had moved underground, and Freedman’s life
had taken what he called “a dull turn.”

One afternoon, he was sitting inside an EG&G warehouse in Fas Vegas,
cleaning camera equipment. “I was thinking about how fast office work gets
boring when my boss walked up to me and said, ‘Hey, Jim, do you want to go
work on a secret project?”’ Freedman didn’t hesitate. “I said yes, because it
sounded interesting, and I wound up at Area 51. I’d never heard of the place

before I went there. I never knew it existed just over the hill from the Nevada
Test Site where I’d worked for so many years. Neither did anyone else who
didn’t have a need-to-know.” When Freedman arrived at Area 51, it felt to him
“like I was arriving on the far side of the moon. You know about the bright side
of the moon; well, in relative terms, that was what the test site was like. Area 51
was the dark side.” What began as a short-term contract in December of 1960
would last for Jim Freedman for the next fourteen years.

One day, in the late summer of 1961, just two months after the Bay of Pigs
became public, Jim Freedman was walking around the base with a checklist of
tasks. His priority job that week struck him as a very odd, very low-tech request.
In a world of cutting-edge science and technological gadgets relating to
espionage, the supervisor wanted Freeman to help Area 51 carpenters locate
more plywood. “The workers were transforming a set of steps into a ramp,” he
explains. “This was happening all over the base. Lots of doorsills were becoming
lots of ramps and I remember thinking, There’s a lot of money going into getting
something low and on wheels to be able to move around this base.” Freedman
knew not to ask questions. “But when a small airplane landed, and out came a
man in the wheelchair, I watched my boss, Werner Weiss of the CIA, meet the
man out on the tarmac. And I knew from watching their interaction just how
important this man was to the CIA. He had white-silvery hair. A very memorable
figure in a wheelchair. For years, I looked for him on TV.” Freedman never saw
the man on TV, but the man was Lyman Kirkpatrick, inspector general for the
CIA. Working on presidential orders to assess Area 51, Kirkpatrick is the only
CIA inspector general known to have visited the base. Despite being confined to
a wheelchair, Kirkpatrick managed to meticulously cover the rugged high-desert
terrain. After Kirkpatrick examined the various buildings he asked to be driven
around the outer edges of the base. There, he found what he considered to be a
security flaw. “ The high and rugged northeast perimeter of the immediate
operating area, which I visited in order to see for myself, is not under
government ownership,” Kirkpatrick wrote in his report, which was declassified
in 2004 but has since been removed from the CIA library archives. “It is subject
to a score or more of mineral claims, at least one of which is visited periodically
by its owner,” Kirkpatrick wrote, referring to the Black Metal and Groom mines.
“Several claims are sites of unoccupied buildings or cellars which together with
the terrain in general afford excellent opportunity for successful penetration by a
skilled and determined opposition,” Kirkpatrick warned. As inspector general for
the CIA, Kirkpatrick was concerned that the base was not “rigorously protected

against sabotage,” most notably by “air violations.” In the game of cat and
mouse between the Soviet Union and the United States, tensions were at an all-
time high. First there had been the Gary Powers incident, in May of 1960. Less
than a year later came the CIA’s failed commando operation at the Bay of Pigs.
The president had been advised that the Soviets could be preparing their own
operation as payback for either of those events. Former president Eisenhower
told Kennedy that “the failure of the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets to do
something that they would otherwise not do,” and Lyman Kirkpatrick warned
that one type of sabotage operation the Soviets could be considering might
involve hitting Area 51. It would be a strike between the eyes, meant to harm the
office of the president in the view of the people. After Gary Powers, the White
House had promised that the Watertown facility had been closed down. After the
Bay of Pigs fiasco, the president promised to rein in covert activity by the CIA.
Any public revelation that Area 51 existed would expose the fact that the CIA,
the Air Force, and defense contractors were all working together on a black
project to overfly Russia again—despite presidential assurances that they would
do no such thing. If the nation were to discover the Mach 3 spy plane project
moving forward at Area 51, what would they think about the president’s
promises? Area 51 was a target in exposure alone, the inspector general said.

Jim Freedman was one of the men assigned to photograph and assess the
mines in the mountains—the terrain that Kirkpatrick had said would “afford
excellent opportunity for successful penetration.” Freedman’s superior, Hank
Meierdierck, decided to make a hunting trip out of the task. Meierdierck was a
living legend at Area 51. In 1956 he had worked as the CIA’s instructor pilot on
base, teaching the Project Aquatone pilots how to fly the U-2. Now, during
Oxcart, Hank Meierdierck had an office at the Pentagon but most of his time was
spent out at Area 51. “One day Hank asked me if I liked to hunt,” recalls Jim
Freedman. “I said yes. Well, Hank smiled and said, ‘Good. Bring your rifle out
next time.’”

Weapons were not allowed on Lockheed transport planes flying in and out of
Area 51 from McCarran Airport. But Freedman’s level of clearance was such
that security did not examine the things he carried with him. “The next trip to
Area 51,1 put my rifle in a box with an oscilloscope,” Freedman explains, “and
that’s how I got my hunting rifle out there.”

Meierdierck found a helicopter pilot to fly the men into the mountains north of

Area 51 to photograph the old mines there. Then he dropped the two men and
their hunting rifles off at a favored spot on Groom Mountain where Area 51
officials liked to surreptitiously hunt deer. Meierdierck told the helicopter pilot
to return the next day.

From on top of Groom Mountain, the view down over Area 51 was
spectacular. It was, as Kirkpatrick had speculated, a perfect place for a Soviet
spy to disguise himself as a deer hunter and take notes. During the day, you
could see the buildings down at Area 51 spread out in an H formation to the west
of the runways. Jeeps and vans could be seen ferrying workers around. If you
had binoculars, you could get a clear look at what was going on. At night, the
whole place went dark; most of the buildings that had windows kept the curtains
drawn. If an aircraft needed to land at night, the lights would quickly flash on,
illuminating the runway. The airplane would land and the lights would quickly
go off, bathing the valley in darkness once again.

For Freedman, the hunting trip dragged on a little long. “Hank was
stubborn,” Freedman explains. “He said he wasn’t leaving until he got a deer.
And he preferred to hunt on his own, so he suggested we split up and meet back
at the campsite for dinner.” Which is what they did. “There was very little for us
to talk about,” Freedman says. “We both knew we were on top secret projects.
You couldn’t afford to talk. Everyone had a wife and a family. No one could
afford to lose their job.” One subject the men could discuss was hunting. Only
three years had passed since the last aboveground atomic tests had detonated
across the valley down below. Freedman wondered if anyone who caught a deer
up on Groom Mountain should even consider eating it because “the deer ate the
foliage which was contaminated from alpha particles from all the tests.” As it
turned out, the men did not catch any deer anyway.

Come Monday, the helicopter pilot returned, and by the end of the next day,
Freedman was sitting in his dining room in Las Vegas, eating dinner with his
wife and kids. He was able to get his hunting rifle out of Area 51 the same way
he got it in: “Inside the oscilloscope case.”

Not long after Lyman Kirkpatrick filed his final inspector general’s report on
Area 51, Richard Bissell resigned . This was not before he had been offered a
lesser job at CIA, as the director of the Office of Science and Technology. But in
that new capacity Bissell’s need-to-know would have been drastically reduced.
In CIA parlance, having one’s access curbed was an insult. Instead, he chose to

leave the Agency.

Without Richard Bissell in charge of the secret CIA facility, what would
become of Area 51? And who would run the Oxcart reconnaissance program?
The decision about Bissell’s replacement went up the chain of command to
President Kennedy. He had been in office for less than a year and already he was
up to his elbows in CIA backlash. President Kennedy’s new secretary of defense
was a man named Robert McNamara, an intellectually minded Harvard Business
School graduate who had won the Legion of Merit during World War II for
performing firebomb analysis from behind a desk. Now, as secretary of defense,
after the Bay of Pigs, McNamara called for the Pentagon to assume control of all
spy plane programs. McNamara was at the top of the chain of command of all
the armed services and believed his Air Force should be in charge of all U.S.
assets with wings. The public had lost confidence in the CIA, McNamara told
the president.

But James Killian and his colleague Edwin Land, now both part of
Kennedy’s presidential foreign intelligence advisory board, told the president
that the best move forward for national security was to keep the CIA in the spy
plane business at Area 51. What happened with Bissell was unfortunate, they
said, suggesting that Richard Bissell, and Richard Bissell alone, had gone rogue .
They argued that the CIA was still the agency best equipped to deliver overhead
intelligence to the president. If that wasn’t possible, Killian and Land said, then
the idea of who controls overhead reconnaissance should be restructured. One
plan was that the CIA might work in better partnership with the Air Force.
President Kennedy liked that. On September 6, 1961, he created a protocol that
required the CIA deputy director and the undersecretary of the Air Force to
comanage all space reconnaissance and aerial espionage programs together as
the National Reconnaissance Office, a classified agency within Robert
McNamara’s Department of Defense. A central headquarters for NRO was
established in Washington, a small office with a limited staff but with a number
of empire-size egos vying for power and control. The organization maintained a
public face, an overt identity at the Pentagon called the Office of Space Systems,
but no one outside a select few knew of NRO’s existence until 1992.

Jim Freedman remembers the transition in the chain of command and how it
affected his work at Area 51. “Because I was the person with a list of every
employee at the area, it was my job to know not just who was who, but who was
the boss of somebody’s boss. An individual person didn’t necessarily know
much more about the person they worked for than their code name. And they

almost certainly didn’t know who was working on the other side of the wall or in
the next trailer over. Wayne Pendleton was the head of the radar group for a
while. He was my go-to person for a lot of different groups. One day, Pendleton
suddenly says, Tm going to Washington, Jim.’ So I said, 'What if I need you,
what number should I call?’ And Pendleton laughed. He said, ‘You won’t need
me because where I’m going doesn’t exist.’ Decades later I would learn that the
place where Wayne was going when he left the Ranch was to a little office in
Washington called NRO.”

After the Bay of Pigs and his resignation, Richard Bissell drifted away from
Washington’s power center like a man scorned. Quickly, his longtime, biggest
supporters became his greatest detractors. Most notable among them was James
Killian. The president’s powerful science adviser, Killian had headhunted Bissell
twice before, the first time in 1946 to work in the economics department at MIT,
and then again in 1954 to manage the U-2 aerial espionage program for the CIA.
For nearly twenty years, Killian had considered Richard Bissell not just a
colleague but a friend. After the Bay of Pigs, Killian turned his back on his
friend. In a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black, Killian told the CIA’s
historian Donald E. Welzenbach that he was terribly upset when he learned of
Bissell’s role in covert CIA operations. In a Studies in Intelligence report for the
CIA, Welzenbach wrote, “Killian looked upon science and technology almost as
a religion, something sacred to be kept from contamination by those who would
misuse it for unwholesome ends. Into this category fit the covert operations and
‘dirty tricks’ of Dick Bissell’s Directorate of Plans.”

It was hypocrisy of the highest order. James Killian had been up to his own
dirty tricks, the true, perilous facts of which have remained buried until now.
Unlike Richard Bissell, because of Killian’s powerful role as President
Eisenhower’s chief science adviser, Killian did not get caught. But what Killian
spearheaded in the name of so-called sacred science in retrospect hardly seems
like science at all. In late 1958, Killian organized, oversaw, and then tried to
cover up the facts regarding two of the most dangerous weapons tests in the
history of the nuclear bomb. Two thermonuclear devices, called Teak and
Orange , each an astonishingly powerful 3.8 megatons, were exploded in the
Earth’s upper atmosphere at Johnston Atoll, 750 miles west of Hawaii. Teak
went off at 252,000 feet, or 50 miles, and Orange went off at 141,000 feet, 28
miles, which is exactly where the ozone layer lies . In hindsight, it was a
ludicrous idea. “ The impetus for these tests was derived from the uncertainty in
U.S. capability to discern Soviet high-altitude nuclear detonation,” read one

classified report. Killian was in charge of the tests, and his rationale for
authorizing them was that if sometime in the future the Soviets were to detonate
a high-altitude nuclear bomb, our scientists would need to know what to look
for.

Instead of being difficult to detect, a nuclear bomb exploding in the ozone
layer was instantly obvious in horrific and catastrophic ways. The fireballs
produced by both Teak and Orange burned the retinas of any living thing that
had been looking up at the sky without goggles within a 225-mile radius of the
blast, including hundreds of monkeys and rabbits that Killian authorized to be
flown in airplanes nearby. The animals’ heads had been locked in gadgets that
forced them to witness the megaton blast. From Guam to Wake Island to Maui,
the natural blue sky changed to a red, white, and gray, creating an aurora 2,100
miles along the geomagnetic meridian. Radio communication throughout a
swath of the Pacific region went dead.

“We almost blew a hole in the ozone layer,” explains A1 O’Donnell, the
EG&G weapons test engineer who in the twelve years since Crossroads had
wired over one hundred nuclear bombs, including Teak and Orange. O’Donnell
was standing on Johnston Island, 720 miles southwest of Honolulu, on August 1,
1958, when the Teak bomb went off. Due to a “program failure” on the Redstone
missile system (which carried the warhead to its target), the rocket went straight
up and detonated directly above where O’Donnell and the rest of the arming and
firing party were working. The bomb was supposed to have detonated twenty-six
miles to the south. In a sanitized film record of the event, men in flip-flops and
shorts can be seen ducking for cover as a phenomenal fireball consumes the sky
overhead. “It was scary,” O’Donnell sighs, remembering the catastrophic event
as an old man, half a century later. There is a hint of resignation in his voice
when he says, “But we were all used to it by then. The bombs had become too
big.” In Teak’s first ten milliseconds, its fireball grew ten miles wide—enough
yield to obliterate Manhattan. At H + 1 second, the fireball was more than forty
miles wide, which could have taken out all five boroughs of New York City. It
was not as if Killian, who was in charge of the project, hadn’t realized the
potential for part of the ozone layer to be destroyed. “In late 1957 and early
1958, the question was raised as to whether or not the ultraviolet emissions from
the Teak and Orange events would ‘burn a hole’ into the natural ozone layer .”

states a 1976 review of the event authored by Los Alamos National Laboratory.
But “the pre-event discussions were inconclusive” and the tests barreled ahead
anyway. Why? “It was argued that even in case of complete destruction of the

ozone layer over an area with radius 50 km, the ozone loss would amount to only

2 x 10 - ^ of the global inventory. The ‘hole’ would be closed promptly by bomb-
produced turbulence and ambient motions in the atmosphere.” As astonishing
and reckless as this was, the follow-up becomes even more unbelievable. “After
the events, little attention was paid to this particular problem, evidently because
no spectacular or unusual observations were made (because of lack of evidence
one way or the other).” Apparently, no one thought to ask the dignitary on hand
that day on Johnston Island, Wernher Von Braun.

In government archival film footage, Von Braun can be seen observing the
Redstone rocket he had designed to get the nuclear weapon up to the ozone
where it would explode. Wearing aviator sunglasses and a loose-fitting Hawaiian
shirt and sporting an island tan, Von Braun appears more playboy than rocket
scientist. But Von Braun was so spooked by the Teak blast that he left the island
before the second test took place. Von Braun was not one to scare easily. When
he worked for Adolf Hitler, he and his colleague Ernst Steinhoff were known to
dash up to Hitler’s lair . Wolfsschanze, in Steinhoff’s personal airplane to brief
the dictator on how the V-2 was coming along. But the power of the Teak bomb
sent Von Braun running. Immediately after the deadened communications
systems were restored, Von Braun fled. He never publicly said why.

Killian’s high-altitude nuclear tests did not stop there. Two weeks later,
another ultrasecret nuclear weapons project called Operation Argus commenced .
Killian’s nuclear bomb tests had now expanded to include outer space. “Argus
was an unusual operation,” a Defense Nuclear Agency summary from 1993
recalls. “It was completed in less than six months after Presidential approval, and
it was completed in complete secrecy. Nuclear-tipped missiles were fired from
ships for the first time.” Oblique words used to conceal another one of the most
radical, covert science experiments conducted by man. On August 27, August
30, and September 6, 1958, three nuclear warheads were launched from X-17
rockets from the deck of the US S Norton Sound as the warship floated off the
coast of South Africa in the South Atlantic Ocean. Up went the missiles and the
warheads until they exploded approximately three hundred miles into space.

This “scientific experiment” was the brainchild of a Greek elevator operator
turned physicist, Nicholas Christofilos. Christofilos convinced Killian that a
nuclear explosion occurring above the Earth’s atmosphere—but within the
Earth’s magnetic field—might produce an electronic pulse that could
hypothetically damage the arming devices on Soviet ICBM warheads trying to
make their way into the United States. While the phenomenon did occur in

minutiae, meaning the arming devices registered “feeling” the pulse from the
nuclear blast, Christofilos was wrong about the possibility that this would
actually stop incoming enemy nuclear missiles in their tracks. In other words, the
tests failed.

To cover his tracks as to the sheer waste and recklessness of the experiment,
in the month following the nuclear detonation in space, Killian wrote a memo to
President Eisenhower attempting to put a congratulatory spin on how quickly the
project occurred and how terrific it was that secrecy was maintained. Dated
November 3, 1958, Killian’s letter began by describing Argus as “probably the
most spectacular event ever conducted.” More egregious self-congratulation
came next: “The experiment was in itself an extraordinary accomplishment.
Especially notable was the successful launching of a large, solid-fuel rocket
carrying a nuclear payload from the heaving deck of a ship in the squally South
Atlantic. Scarcely less so is the fact that the whole experiment was planned and
carried out in less than five months... Impressive, too, is the fact that no leaks
have occurred.”

When the New York Times’s senior science writer Walter Sullivan hand-
delivered a letter to Killian letting him know the New York Times was in
possession of leaked information about these secret tests, the White House went
into denial mode. “Neither confirm nor deny such leaks.” the president’s special
assistant Karl G. Harr Jr. wrote in a secret memo to Killian. “If the New York
Times, or anyone else, breaks a substantial part of the story,” one possible
response would be to say the White House had disclosed “all that we may safely
say from a national security point of view.” In regards to brazenly violating the
White House policy of announcing every nuclear test, Killian’s position was to
be that “it was a scientific experiment utilizing a nuclear detonation to discharge
electrons into the Earth’s magnetic field.” It was semantics that gave Killian the
authority, or cover, to declare that a nuclear test was not a nuclear test. Adding
one last ironic touch of deception, the president’s special assistant told Killian
that were the New York Times to make the Argus test public, a panel of scientists
“should meet with the press in the Great Hall of the National Academy of
Science in order to emphasize the scientific aspects of this experiment.”

Were the president’s top science advisers really making America safer? Or
were they abusing their power with the president? Couple their power with the
total lack of oversight they enjoyed, and it was the president’s scientists who
paved the road for the U.S. militarization of space. “It was agreed that I would
be protected from congressional inquisition .” Killian wrote in his memoirs,

adding, “I think now this was the wrong decision. It would have been of help to
Congress to have been more fully informed about the work of PSAC [President’s
Science Advisory Committee], and help me to have a better feeling for
congressional opinion.”

Beginning with Argus, the president’s science advisers were using space as
their laboratory, conducting tests that a Defense Nuclear Agency review board
would later call “poorly instrumented and hastily executed.” They did so with
total disregard for potentially catastrophic effects on the planet, not to mention
the effect it would have decades later on the arms race in space. According to the
same report, Killian was aware of the risk and took a gamble. There had been
discussions regarding the possibility that the Teak and Orange shots really could
burn holes in the ozone. But those “pre-event discussions were inconclusive,”
the report said. And so the scientists went forward on the assumption that if a
hole happened, it would later be closed.

In reality, Killian and others had no idea what would or would not happen
when the megaton bomb exploded in the upper atmosphere. “And they didn’t
factor in to their equations what could have happened if they failed,” recalls A1
O’Donnell. “We were lucky. When the Teak bomb exploded right over our heads
on Johnston Island, we thought we might be goners. It was an enormous bright
white-light blast.” The men did not have radio communications for eight hours.
“All the birds on the island that had been pestering us during the setup, these big
fearless birds we called Gooney birds, after the bomb went off, they just
disappeared. Or maybe they died.” When Admiral Parker of the Armed Forces
Special Weapons Project finally reached O’Donnell and the rest of the EG&G
crew by radio from his office in the Pentagon, his words were: “Are you still
there?”

If American citizens were in the dark about the megaton thermonuclear
weapons tests being conducted by the American military in space, the Russians
certainly were not. They forged ahead with an unprecedented weapons test of
their own. On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest, most
powerful nuclear weapon the world had ever known. Called the Tsar Bomba, the
hydrogen bomb had an unbelievable yield of fifty megatons, roughly ten times
the amount of all the explosives used in seven years of war during World War II,
including both nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tsar Bomba,
detonated over northern Russia, flattened entire villages in surrounding areas and
broke windows a thousand miles away in Finland. Anyone within a four-
hundred-mile radius who was staring at the blast would have gone blind. Soviet

leader Nikita Khrushchev told the United Nations Assembly that the purpose of
the test was to “show somebody Kuzka’s mother”—to show somebody who’s
boss. The world was racing toward catastrophe. Would the A-12 spy planes
heading to Area 51 really help, or would overhead espionage prove to be nothing
more than a drop in the bucket?

CHAPTER TEN

Wizards of Science. Technology . and Diplomacy

Harry Martin stood on the tarmac mesmerized by the beauty of the Oxcart.
With its long, shiny fuselage, the airplane resembled a cobra with wings. As the
master fuels sergeant, Martin had been at Area 51 since the very first days of the
Oxcart program, back when the tarmac he was standing on was being poured as
cement. Now, something big was happening at Area 51. The Oxcart had arrived
and it was getting ready to fly. For more than a week, Martin had watched
dignitaries come and go, touching down and taking off in Air Force jets. The
generals would inevitably show up in the hangar where Martin worked because
it was the place where the airplane stayed. Martin’s job was to prep the aircraft
with fuel, which for weeks had been leaking as if through a sieve.

Martin had caught glimpses of General LeMay, shorter than he’d expected
but chomping on his signature cigar like he did on the cover of magazines.
Martin had also seen General Doolittle, of the harrowing World War II Doolittle
Raid. Harry Martin never shook hands with any of the generals; they were busy
and way above his pay grade. Besides, Martin’s left hand was wrapped in a
bandage, which made work slightly challenging, although he was most grateful
to still have a thumb. Martin had been working with a saw and a pipe the week
before when his tool slipped and nearly severed his most important finger.
Fortunately, a flight surgeon was working with a project pilot in the hangar next
door and Martin got his thumb sewn together fast.

It was April 25, 1962. Just a few buildings down from where Martin worked,
Lockheed test pilot Louis Schalk sat in a recliner inside a Quonset hut taking a
nap when a man from the Agency put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Lou,
wake up!” The Oxcart was ready and it was time for Lou Schalk to fly. Two

physiological support division officers helped Schalk into a flight suit, which
looked like a coverall. There was no need for a pressure suit because today
Schalk was only going to make a taxi test. Out on the tarmac, an engineer rolled
up a metal set of stairs and Schalk climbed up into the strange-looking aircraft.
There were no observers other than the crew. John Parangosky, who authored a
secret interagency monograph called “The Oxcart History,” declassified in 2007,
noted that if anyone had been watching he would have been unable to process
what he was looking at. “A casual observer would have been startled by the
appearance of this vehicle; he would have perhaps noticed especially its
extremely long, slim shape, its two enormous jet engines, its long, sharp
projecting nose, and its swept-back wings which appeared far too short to
support the fuselage in flight.” It was a revolutionary airplane, Parangosky
wrote, able to fly at three times the speed of sound for more than three thousand
miles without refueling—all the way from Nevada to DC in less than an hour.
“Toward the end of its flight, when fuel began to run low, it could cruise at over
90,000 feet.”

But of course there were no casual observers present at Area 51. On that
sunny day at Area 51 in April of 1962, this was the only A-12 Oxcart that
Lockheed had completed for the CIA so far.

As for all the remarkable things the aircraft had been meticulously designed
to do, it wasn’t able to do any of them yet. Sitting on the tarmac, the aircraft was
160,000 pounds of titanium outfitted with millions of dollars’ worth of expensive
equipment that no one yet knew how to work, certainly not above seventy
thousand feet. Like its predecessor the U-2, the Oxcart was an aircraft without a
manual. Unlike the U-2, this aircraft was technologically forty years ahead of its
time. Some of the records the Oxcart would soon set would hold all the way into
the new millennium.

Lou Schalk fired up the engines and began rolling down the runway for the
taxi test. To everyone’s surprise, including Lou Schalk’s, the aircraft
unexpectedly got lift. Given the enormous engine power, the aircraft suddenly
started flying—lifting up just twenty feet off the ground. Stunned and horrified,
Kelly Johnson watched from the control tower. “The aircraft began wobbling.”
Johnson wrote in his notes, which “set up lateral oscillations which were horrible
to see.” Johnson feared the airplane might crash before its first official flight.
Schalk was equally surprised and decided not to try to circle around. Instead he
set the plane down as quickly as he could. This meant landing in the dry lake
bed, nearly two miles beyond where the runway ended. When it hit the earth, the

aircraft sent up a huge cloud of dust, obscuring it from view. Schalk turned the
plane around and drove back toward the control towers, still engulfed in a cloud
of dust and dirt. When he got back, the Lockheed engineers ran up to the
airplane on the metal rack of stairs. Kelly Johnson had only four words for
Schalk: “What in Hell. Lou?” For about fifteen very tense minutes, Johnson had
thought Lou Schalk had wrecked the CIA’s only Oxcart spy plane.

The following day, Schalk flew again, this time with Kelly Johnson’s
blessings but still not as an official first flight. Harry Martin was standing on the
tarmac when the aircraft took off. “It was beautiful. Remarkable. Just watching it
took your breath away,” Martin recalls. “I remember thinking, This is cool. And
then, all of a sudden, as Schalk rose up in the air, pieces of the airplane started to
fall off!” The engineers standing next to Martin panicked. Harry Martin thought
for sure the airplane was going to crash. But Lou Schalk kept flying. The pieces
of the airplane were thin slices of the titanium fuselage, called fillets. Their
sudden absence did not affect low-altitude flight. Schalk flew for forty minutes
and returned to Area 51. It was mission accomplished for Schalk but not for the
engineers. They spent the next four days roaming around Groom Lake
attempting to locate and reattach the pieces of the plane. Still, it was a milestone
for the CIA. Three years, ten months, and seven days had passed since Kelly
Johnson first presented his plans for a Mach 3 spy plane to Richard Bissell, and
here was the Oxcart, finally ready for its first official flight.

Agency officials were flown in from Washington to watch and to celebrate.
Jim Freedman coordinated pickups and deliveries between McCarran Airport
and the Ranch. It was a grand, congratulatory affair with lots of drinking in the
newly constructed bar, called House-Six. Rare film footage of the historic event ,
shot by the CIA, shows men in suits milling around the tarmac slapping one
another on the back over this incredible flying machine. They watch the aircraft
take off and disappear from view. Schalk traveled up to thirty thousand feet, flew
around in the restricted airspace for fifty-nine minutes, and came back down. His
top speed was four hundred miles per hour. Watching from the tarmac was
Richard Bissell, tall and gangly, wearing a dark suit and a porkpie hat. Bissell
had been invited to attend the groundbreaking event as a guest of Kelly Johnson.
It was a significant gesture; the two men had become friends, and Kelly Johnson
was notably making a point. “Part of what made Kelly Johnson such a good man
was that he was extremely loyal to the people he considered his friends,” Ed
Lovick explains. For Bissell, the visit to Area 51 had to have been bittersweet. It
would be the last time he would ever set foot at the facility he had overseen for

the CIA since it was nothing but a desert floor. Richard Bissell would never be
invited back again.

And Area 51 would soon have a new mayor.

It was late at night in the summer of 1962 and Bud Wheelon sat in the library in
the Washington, DC, home of Howard and Jane Roman, two clandestine officers
with CIA. It was only Wheelon’s second month employed by the Agency, and
because he was not a career spy, he had had a lot of catching up to do. Almost
every night, he worked until ten, having just accepted the job that made him the
Agency’s first head of the Directorate of Science and Technology, or DS&T.

Only thirty-three years old, Wheelon was a brilliant ballistic-missile scientist and
signals intelligence analyst. He was also a graduate of MIT and had played
mgby with James Killian when Killian was the president there. Now he had been
hand-picked by President Kennedy’s science advisers , including James Killian,
to replace Richard Bissell on all overhead reconnaissance projects for the CIA.
This included satellites, U-2 operations, and the Oxcart spy plane. It was the job
Bissell had declined, but “in this wav. I became the new ‘Mayor of Area 51.’”
Wheelon explains.

“I did not have much to do at night so I started reading clandestine reports,
which I’d never seen before,” Wheelon says. Although he found many
uninteresting, one in particular caught his eye. “It made me concerned. At the
time, there was a very serious National Intelligence Estimate under way for
President Kennedy, one that would address the question: Will the Russians put
nuclear missiles in Cuba? I had been briefed that the estimate was coming down
on the side that the Russians would not do such a thing. The Pentagon had
decided that putting missiles in Cuba was too reckless a move for the Russians
and that they would not do such a reckless thing.”

The Pentagon was dead wrong. As Wheelon read dozens of intelligence
reports, one rose up like a red flag. “One thing you have to worry about with
anyone informing against a person or a state is fabrication,” Wheelon explains.
“There were a lot of Cubans in Miami [at the time] whose sugar plantations had
been taken away from them by Castro and they wanted action taken. But there
was one report that caught my eye. The informant said that he’d seen very long
trailers, big trucks, led by jeeps with Soviet security people inside. As these
trucks made their way through certain villages, Cubans were directing traffic so
the long trailers could get by. In South America, often on the street corners, you

will find post-office boxes. They are not squat boxes with a level opening like
you find in the States. Instead, they are more of a traditional letterbox attached at
the top of a long pole. The informant witnessed one of these very long trailer
trucks coming up to an intersection and not being able to make the curb. There
was a letterbox blocking the way. Some of the Soviet security people got out of
the truck. They grabbed an acetylene torch from the back and cut the letterbox
right down. They didn’t waste any time or give it a second thought. When I read
that, I thought, Whoever reported this is no fabricator. This is not a detail you
could make up. Whatever was in those trailers was too important to let a
letterbox stand in the way.”

Wheelon believed there were missiles inside the trailers. Missiles with
nuclear warheads. Unknown to Wheelon at the time, his new boss, CIA director
John McCone, also believed this was true. Except McCone wasn’t around
Washington, DC; he was in Paris, on his honeymoon. This left Wheelon in
charge of more than was usual for a newcomer to the CIA. Concerned by the
intelligence report, Wheelon asked to meet with the head of the board of the
National Intelligence Council, Sherman Kent. “I went to him and I said, ‘Sherm,
I am new around here so you should discount a lot of what I say. I am not a
professional intelligence person, but it looks to me like the evidence is
overwhelming that they have missiles down there.’” Sherman Kent thanked
Wheelon for his advice but explained that the board was going to present
President Kennedy with the opposite conclusion—that there were no Soviet
missiles in Cuba.

The Cuban missile crisis is a story of conflict between the United States and the
Soviet Union, and the drama that culminated in a ten-day standoff between two
superpowers on the brink of thermonuclear war. But it is also the story of two
powerful rivals within the American services, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force,
and how they set aside historical differences to work together to save the world
from near nuclear annihilation. Like so many international crises of the Cold
War, the Cuban missile crisis had its link to Area 51—through the U-2.

During the crisis, the CIA and the Air Force worked together to conduct the
U-2 spy mission that caused the Soviet Union to back down. How this was
accomplished not only involved two key Area 51 players but also set a precedent
for the power-sharing arrangement at Area 51 that worked well for a while, until
it didn’t work anymore. The diplomatic efforts of one Army Air Force old-timer

and one CIA newcomer helped set the stage for success. The old-timer was
General Jack Ledford, and the newcomer was Bud Wheelon.

On the afternoon of August 29, 1962, a U-2 spy plane flying over Cuba
spotted eight surface-to-air missile sites in the western part of Cuba, the same
SA-2 missile systems that had shot down Gary Powers two years before. The
following week, three more missile sites were discovered on the island, as well
as a Soviet MiG-21 parked on the Santa Clara airfield nearby. For two months,
the Agency had been analyzing reports that said between 4,000 and 6,000
individuals from the Soviet bloc had arrived in Cuba, including 1.700 Soviet
military technicians . Cuban citizens were being kept from entering port areas
where the Soviet-bloc ships were unloading unusually large crates, ones big
enough to “contain airplane fuselage or missile components.” The implications
were threefold: that Russia was building up the Cuban armed forces, that they
were establishing multiple missile sites, and that they were establishing
electronic jamming facilities against Cape Canaveral in Florida as well as other
important U.S. installations. The director of the CIA, John McCone, had already
told the president’s military advisers that he believed the Soviets were laying a
deadly trap involving nuclear missiles. But there was no hard evidence of the
missiles themselves, the military argued, and their position on that fact was firm.
(The Pentagon did not doubt that the Soviets wanted to put nuclear missiles on
Cuba; officials just didn’t think they’d accomplished that yet.) McCone left for
his honeymoon in Paris .

In the following month, September, bad weather got in the way of good
photographic intelligence. Day after day it rained over Cuba or the island was
shrouded in heavy cloud cover. Finally, on September 29, a CIA U-2 mission
over the Isle of Pines and the Bay of Pigs revealed yet another previously
unknown missile site. President Kennedy’s top advisers were convened. The CIA
warned the advisers of more unknown dangers in Cuba and pushed for additional
overflights so as to gain better intelligence on military installations there.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk were
opposed to the idea. Not another Gary Powers incident , they said. But on
October 5 and 7, the CIA got presidential approval to run two additional
missions of its own. The resultant news was hard to ignore: there were now a
total of nineteen surface-to-air missile sites on the island of Cuba, meaning there
was something very important that the Soviets were intent on defending there.
The Pentagon held firm. There was still no hard data revealing actual missiles,
McNamara and Rusk said. Making matters even more complicated, JFK’s Air

Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, was pushing for preemptive strikes
against Cuba. It was a volatile and incredibly dangerous situation. If the CIA was
correct and there already were nuclear missiles in Cuba, then LeMay’s so-called
preemptive strikes would actually initiate a nuclear war, not prevent one.

What the Agency needed desperately was a wizard of diplomacy, someone
who could help the rival agencies see eye to eye so they could all work together
to get the Soviets to back down. The Agency and the Air Force had decidedly
different ideas on imminent missions; the CIA wanted to gather more
intelligence with the U-2; the Air Force wanted to prepare for war. An individual
who could wear both hats with relative objectivity was needed, someone who
could see both sides of the debate. In a rare moment of accord, both sides agreed
that the man for the job was Brigadier General Jack Ledford. Just a few weeks
earlier, Ledford had been asked by McCone to serve as the director of the Office
of Special Activities at the Pentagon, meaning he would be the Pentagon liaison
to the CIA at Area 51. Ledford had just graduated from the Industrial College of
the Armed Forces and was looking forward to moving out west when his old
World War II commander General LeMay encouraged him to take the new CIA
liaison job .

LeMay had known Ledford since the war in the Pacific when Ledford flew
under his command. A former Olympic diver, Ledford was tall, charismatic, and
handsome. According to Wheelon, “He was someone whose charisma was
contagious. Ledford was impossible not to like to be around.” There was, of
course, the legendary story of Ledford’s plane crash, involving heroics in the
Pacific theater during World War II. As a captain in the Air Force, Ledford was
making a bombing run over Kyushu Island, Japan, when he was attacked by
Japanese fighter jets, his airplane and his own body hit with fire. Ledford’s flight
engineer, Master Sergeant Harry C. Miller, was hit in the head. The medic on
board treated Miller and tried to treat Ledford with opiates , who declined so he
could keep his head clear. With the aircraft crashing, Ledford and the medic
opened a parachute, cut the shroud lines, and attached the chute to the
unconscious flight engineer. They dropped the man through the nose of the
wheel well; Captain Ledford followed, delaying opening his own parachute so
he could be next to Sergeant Miller when he landed. Miller would be
unconscious when he hit the earth, and without Ledford’s help he would likely
have broken his back. The medic, not far behind, later recounted how amazing it
was that Ledford’s daring and dangerous plan had actually worked.

Now, two decades later, at the Cuban missile crisis round table, Ledford

showed the same foresight in preempting a potentially deadly situation. The first
thing General Ledford did was present the CIA and the Air Force with a shoot-
down analysis, detailing the odds for losing a U-2 on another overflight. The
chances were one in six. Ledford said . He pushed for the U-2 mission, arguing
that it was better to know now if there really were nuclear missiles in Cuba than
to wish you knew later on, when it could be too late. Once these cold hard facts
were on the table, the heart of the debate became clear. The point of contention
was not whether or not to fly the mission. Rather, it was who would fly the
mission—the Air Force or the CIA. As it turned out, each organization wanted
the job. President Kennedy felt the mission needed to involve a pilot wearing a
blue U.S. Air Force pilot suit. Kennedy felt that if a CIA spy plane were to get
shot down over Cuba, there would be too much baggage attached to the event,
that it would rekindle hostilities over the Gary Powers shoot-down. But General
Ledford knew what the president did not: that the CIA had higher-quality U-2
airplanes, ones far less likely to end up getting shot down. Agency U-2s flew
five thousand feet higher than their heavier Air Force U-2 counterparts, which
were weighed down by additional reconnaissance gear. The CIA airplanes also
had better electronic countermeasure packages, meaning they had more
sophisticated means of jamming SA-2 missiles coming at them. So Ledford
performed diplomatic wizardry by convincing the CIA to actually loan the Air
Force its prized U-2 airplanes. With the fate of the free world at stake, the CIA
and the Air Force agreed to work together to solve the crisis.

On October 14, an Air Force pilot flying a CIA U-2 brought home film
footage of Cuba that the White House needed to see. Photographs showing
nuclear missiles supplied by the Soviet Union and set up on missile stands in
Cuba. Those eight canisters of film brought back by the CIA’s U-2 set in motion
the Cuban missile crisis, bringing the world closer than it had ever come to all-
out nuclear war. They would also give the work going on at Area 51a shot in the
arm. The Pentagon told the CIA they wanted the Oxcart operations ready
immediately so the aircraft could be used to overfly Cuba. A CIA review of
Oxcart, declassified in 2007, said it flatly: “The Oxcart program suddenly
assumed greater significance than ever, and its achievement of operational status
became one of the highest national priorities.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

What Airplane?

Gardening helped CIA pilot Kenneth Collins relax. He had over a hundred
rosebushes in his garden, which he and his wife, Jane, pruned together on
weekends after Collins returned home from a long, mysterious week at the
Ranch. At Area 51, where he worked as a project pilot, Collins went by the code
name Ken Colmar . “Same first name because you will instantly respond to it
when called,” Collins explains. “Colmar for the C, in case you had something
monogrammed.” His call sign was Dutch 21 but most men on base called him
the Iceman. The pressure-suit officers came up with the nickname. “I was known
to show no emotion or irritation even after a particularly dangerous flight,”
Collins recalls. The pressure-suit officers could gauge how tough a flight was by
how sweaty a pilot’s underwear was when they helped pilots undress. Collins’s
underwear was always remarkably dry.

Flying Oxcart was, to an Air Force pilot, the single most elite job in the
nation at the time. Ken Collins “commuted” to Area 51 each week, flying in
from sunny Southern California, where he and other pilots who now worked for
the CIA pretended to live normal lives with their pretty wives and, ideally, a few
children. Having a stable marriage and family had become a CIA-pilot mandate
during Oxcart, something that was not in place during the U-2. It was Gary
Powers’s alcoholic wife who’d triggered the change. Some in the Agency
believed she put the secrecy of the entire U-2 program at risk with behavior that
even they could not control. Once, Barbara Powers got it into her head to visit
her husband at his clandestine post in Turkey. She made it as far as Athens
before the officer assigned to watch her notified Powers that he would be out of
a job if he couldn’t keep his impetuous wife in line. Ken Collins was told this

story during his first interview at the Pentagon. Loose lips didn’t just sink ships,
he was reminded; loose lips could trigger nuclear war. Collins also learned that
his wife, Jane, would be subject to psychological screening were he to be
accepted into a top secret program rumored to involve “space travel.”

Collins and his family were moved from their home in South Carolina to a
Los Angeles suburb called Northridge and into a four-bedroom raised ranch with
a two-car garage and an avocado tree out front. He was thirty-six years old. Jane
attended church and collected antique china. All four of Jane and Ken Collins’s
children, two boys and two girls, maintained good grades in school. The
neighbors were told Mr. Collins worked for Hughes Aircraft Company. Collins
was told to report nosy neighbors to the CIA, and if any foreign-borns tried to
befriend the Collinses, they were to notify the Agency, who would look into the
matter.

Each Monday morning, Collins left his home and drove to Burbank Airport,
nine miles to the southwest. There, he and the other Oxcart pilots climbed
aboard Constellation propeller planes and headed to Area 51, never with more
than two pilots per airplane—a guideline put into place after the Mount
Charleston crash eight years earlier. The deaths of those top Agency and Air
Force managers and scientists had set progress on the U-2 program back several
months. Now, in 1963, Oxcart was already more than a year behind schedule.
The Agency could not afford to lose any pilots. The vetting process alone took
eighteen months and getting familiar with the aircraft took another year.

After leaving Burbank, Collins and his fellow pilots were flown, two by two,
up over the Mojave Desert to the northeast, past China Lake, and into the
Tikaboo Valley. Flying into the restricted airspace above the Nevada Test Site,
Collins would look out the window and make a mental note of the ever-growing
landscape of giant craters. The appearance of a new, moonlike subsidence crater
was often a weekly occurrence now that nuclear testing had moved underground.
When seen from above, the landscape at the Nevada Test Site looked like a
battlefield after the apocalypse. For Collins, the destruction was a solid visual
reminder of what scorched earth would look like after a nuclear war.

The Agency couldn’t have chosen a more dedicated pilot. Collecting
intelligence on dangerous reconnaissance flights was Ken Collins’s life mission;
it was what he did best. He seemed to be propelled by a natural talent and kept
alive by an unknown force Collins called fate. “Fate is a hunter,” Collins
believes. “When it comes for you, it comes,” and for whatever reason it was not
time for death to come to him yet. This was a notion Collins formulated during

the Korean War while flying reconnaissance missions and watching so many
talented and brave fellow pilots die. How else but by fate did he survive all 113
combat missions he had flown? On those classified missions, the young Collins
was armed with only a camera in the nose of his airplane as he flew deep into
North Korea , sometimes all the way over the Yalu River, being fired at by MiG
fighter jets . During the war, he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and
also the coveted Silver Star for valor , the third-highest military decoration a
member of the armed services can receive. Both medals were pinned on
Collins’s chest before he turned twenty-four.

But now, as an Oxcart pilot, Collins kept his medals tucked away in a drawer,
never mentioning that he had received them. As with many servicemen, glory
was a difficult distinction to contemplate when so many of your fellows had
died. Accepting fate as the hunter made things easier for Collins, which is how
he dealt with the memory of his closest friend and former wingman from the
Fifteenth Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, Charles R. “Chuck” Parkerson. The
two men had flown on many missions together, but there was one from which
Parkerson never came home. “We had flown into North Korea and back out side
by side,” Collins recalls. “We were almost home when Parkerson radioed me. He
said the engine on his RF-80 had flamed out and he was unable to restart it. I
saw he was losing altitude quickly and he knew that soon he would crash.”
Parachuting into enemy territory meant certain death. “Over the radio, Parkerson
asked me, ‘What should I do?”’ Collins explains. “I said, ‘Fly out over the
Yellow Sea and I’ll fly with you.’ I told him to bail out in the water and I’d send
his coordinates back to base for a rescue team.” It seemed like a good idea, and
Collins flew alongside his wingman as they headed toward the Yellow Sea.
Parkerson prepared for a bailout. “But there was a problem,” Collins recalls.

“The canopy on Parkerson’s RF-80 was stuck. Jammed. It wouldn’t open, which
meant he was trapped inside the airplane. There was nothing I could do for my
friend except to fly alongside him all the way until the end.” Collins watched
Parkerson land his airplane on the sea. With Parkerson unable to get out of the
sinking aircraft, Collins waited, watching from the air as his friend drowned.
“When your time is up, it is up,” Collins recalls.

Ten years later, it was 1963, the Korean War was history, and there was an
airplane to get ready at Area 51. After the twin-prop passed over the last set of
hills on the Nevada Test Site’s eastern edge, the airstrip at Groom Lake came

into view, and Collins thought about how no one but his fellow CIA pilots had
any idea who he really was. During training missions, the papers in Collins’s
flight pouch identified him only as a NASA weather pilot. His space-age-looking
aircraft was registered to an airfield called Watertown Strip, Nevada. He was
never to carry any personal effects with him in the airplane. When the Lockheed
Constellation landed on the tarmac at Area 51, security guards took his ID and
papers and locked them away in a metal box. Each Friday, before the afternoon
flight home, Collins’s identity was returned to him.

His mission flight that day, May 24, 1963, should have been like any other
flight. By now, there were a total of five Oxcarts being flight-tested at Area 51 .
and Collins breezed through his prebriefing with the Lockheed engineers,
making mental notes about the different tasks he was to perform during the
flight. The engineers wanted to know how certain engine controls worked during
acceleration and slow cruise. Today’s test would be subsonic with the high-
performance aircraft traveling somewhere around 450 miles per hour, like a
racehorse out for a trot. It was to be a short mission up over Utah, into
Wyoming, and back to Area 51. Air Force chase pilot Captain Donald Donohue
would start out following Collins in an F-101 Voodoo. Later. Jack Weeks , also
an Oxcart project pilot, would pick up the task.

For a little over an hour, everything appeared to be normal. Heading into
Wendover, Utah, Collins made note of a large cumulus cloud that lay ahead. As
Collins slowed down, Jack Weeks signaled that he was going to head back to
Area 51. The F-101 could not handle flying as slow as Collins needed to fly that
day. Besides, from Weeks’s perspective, everything on the Oxcart looked fine.
Collins gave Weeks the okay signal with one hand in the cockpit window and
headed into the cloud.

“ Suddenly, the altimeter was rapidly unwinding , indicating a rapid loss of
speed,” Collins recalls. In heavy clouds, Collins had no visual references to
determine where he was. “I advanced the throttles to counter the loss of airspeed.
But instead of responding, and without any warning, the aircraft pitched up and
flipped over with me trapped underneath. Then it went into an inverted flat
spin.” The Agency’s million-dollar A-12 Oxcart was unrecoverable and
crashing. Collins needed to bail out.

Collins had no idea how close he was to the Earth’s surface because he was
in the middle of a cloud and couldn’t see out of it. He also did not know if he
was over a mountain range, which would mean he had even less time to eject.
Collins closed his visor and grabbed the ejection ring that was positioned

between his legs. He pushed his head firmly against the headrest and pulled.

This kind of radical ejection from a prized top secret aircraft is not easy to
forget, and Collins recalls dramatic details. “The canopy of the aircraft flew off
and disappeared but I was still upside down, with the aircraft on top of me,” he
explains. “Having pulled the D-ring, my boot stirrups snapped back. The
explosive system in the seat rocket engaged, shooting me downward and away
from the aircraft.” First Collins separated from the Oxcart. Next he separated
from his seat. After that, he was a body falling through the air until a small
parachute called a drogue snapped open, slowing his body down. In his long
history of flying airplanes, this was the first time Collins had ever had to bail
out. Falling to Earth, he tried to get a sense of what state he might be over. Was
he in Nevada or Utah? The ground below him appeared to be high-desert terrain,
low hills but no mountains that he could see. He was still too high up to discern
if there were roads. As he floated down, in the distance he spotted the heavy
black aircraft tumbling through the air until it disappeared from sight. “I
remember seeing a large, black column of smoke rise up from the desert floor
and thinking, That’s my airplane.” Only now there was nothing left of it but an
incinerated hunk of titanium smoldering on the ground. Fate was a hunter, all
right.

Suddenly, Collins felt his parachute break away and he began to free-fall
once again. Had his luck run out? he wondered. Was today the day he was going
to die? But then, as suddenly as the one parachute had broken away, he felt
another tug at his shoulders, and a second parachute blossomed above him. This
one was more than twice the size of the drogue. He began to float gently toward
Earth. Collins hadn’t been told that the A-12 Oxcart ejection system had two
separate parachutes. The first parachute, or drogue, was small enough to slow
the pilot down and get him to an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. Then the
drogue chute would jettison away in advance of the main parachute deploying.
This large, thirty-five-foot-diameter landing aid was the one most pilots were
familiar with.

With the ground below him quickly getting closer, Collins could see roads
and sagebrush. He wondered how long it might take for anyone to locate him.
When fellow pilot Jack Weeks had left him, just minutes before the crash,
everything on Collins’s aircraft had seemed fine, but because of secrecy
protocols, Collins had not made radio contact with the command post before he
bailed out. He could see that he was most likely somewhere north of the Salt
Lake salt flats. Collins tucked his legs up and assumed the landing position.

When he hit the ground, he rolled. His mind went through the checklist of what
to do next.

Collins unclipped himself from the parachute and began collecting
everything around him. Flight-protocol pages and filmstrips of navigational
maps fluttered across the desert. As he hurried to collect the top secret papers, he
was surprised to hear a car motor in the distance. Looking up, he saw a pickup
truck bouncing toward him along a dirt desert road. “As it got closer, I could see
there were three men in the front cab,” Collins recalls. “The truck pulled
alongside me and came to a stop. I could see they had my aircraft canopy in the
back of their pickup.”

The men, who appeared to be local ranchers, sized up Collins. Because the
flight had been subsonic, Collins was wearing a standard flight suit and not a
high-altitude pressure suit, which would have made him look like an astronaut or
an alien and likely prompted a lot more questions. Instead, the ranchers asked
Collins if he wanted a ride. They said they knew exactly where his airplane had
crashed, and if he hopped in, they’d give him a ride back to his plane. Until that
moment, no civilian without a top secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on
the Oxcart, and Collins had strict orders to keep it that way. He’d been briefed on
what to do in a security breach such as this one, given a cover story by the
Agency that fit perfectly with the proximity to the Nevada Test Site—and with
the times. Collins told the ranchers that his aircraft was an F-105 fighter jet and
that it had a nuclear weapon on board. The men’s expressions changed from
helpful to fearful. “They got very nervous and said if I wanted a ride, I better
jump in quick because they were not staying around Wendover for long,” Collins
recalls.

The ranchers drove Collins to the nearest highway patrol office. There, he
jumped out, took his airplane canopy from the back of the truck, and watched the
men speed off. Collins reached into the pocket of his flight suit. Inside, he found
the note that read call this number, followed by a telephone number. Also in his
pocket was a dime. Inside the highway patrol office, Collins asked the officer on
duty where he could find the nearest pay phone. The man pointed around to the
side of the building, and using the Agency’s dime, Collins made the phone call
that no Agency pilot ever wants to make. A little less than an hour later, Kelly
Johnson’s private airplane landed in Wendover, Utah, along with several men
from the CIA. After a brief exchange of words so Kelly Johnson could confirm
that Collins was physically okay, Collins boarded the airplane. During the two-
hour flight to the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico, no one said a word. “There

would be plenty of talking to do during the debriefing,” Collins says, “and with
the Agency’s tape recorders taking everything down.” A crash of a CIA spy
plane meant someone had some explaining to do.

Back in the control room at Groom Lake, navigator Sam Pizzo had a
monumental amount of work on his hands. News of Collins’s crash had just hit
the command post, and it was up to Colonel Holbury, the air commander of
Detachment 1 of the 1129th U.S. Air Force Special Activities Squadron, to put
together a search team for the crash site. “Maintenance guys, security guys,
navigators, we all took off in trucks and airplanes and headed to Utah,” Pizzo
explains. With Collins confirmed alive, the goal now was to locate every single
piece of the wrecked airplane, “every nut, bolt, and sliver of fuselage.” The
efforts would be staged from an old, abandoned airfield northwest of the dry
lakes. These were the same facilities where World War II bombers had practiced
for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb runs. The quarters there, long
since deserted, were rudimentary. There was no running water or heat. This
meant the men from Groom Lake brought their own cooks, cots, and gear as part
of their crash-recovery team.

Once they found the site, the work crew had a lot of digging to do. The
aircraft, Article #123, hadn’t broken apart in flight, but given the speed at which
it had hit the earth, huge sections of the airplane had become buried. Critically
important was locating every loose piece of the titanium fuselage. The metal was
rare and expensive, and the fact that the Agency’s spy plane was hand-forged
from titanium was a closely held secret. If a news reporter or a local got a hold
of even the smallest piece of the aircraft, its unusual composition would raise
questions that might threaten the cover of the entire Oxcart program. Equally
critical to national security was making sure the radar-absorbing materials,
known as composite and that covered the entire airplane, remained in
government control. If a piece of the plane got into the wrong hands, the results
could be disastrous: the Russians could learn the secret of stealth.

Along with a crew of more than one hundred men, the Agency brought its
own horses to the crash site. Men from Groom Lake took to the desert terrain on
horseback and began their search. For two days they scoured the ground, looking
for stray pieces of airplane as well as for flight papers and maps that had been in
the cockpit with Collins. “By the time we were done, we’d combed over every
single square inch of ground,” Pizzo recalls. A massive C-124 transport plane
hauled the pieces of the airplane back to Area 51. In a heavily guarded hangar
there, what was left of the airplane was spread out, piece by piece, in an effort to

re-create its shape.

Richard Bissell’s departure from Area 51 a year earlier had left a huge power
vacuum at the base. There was a general feeling among the men working there
now that the vacuum was being filled by Air Force brass . This made perfect
sense. Whereas the U-2 was, in essence, a motorized glider, the A-12 Oxcart was
the highest, fastest, most state-of-the-art piloted aircraft in the world. For men
who prided themselves on airpower—as did everyone involved in the U.S. Air
Force—the supersonic Oxcart was the top dog. The Area 51 facility was now
one of the Air Force’s most prestigious billets, a place where officers got to be in
charge of their “own little air force,” as Major General Paul Bacalis had once
said. What this meant was that Pentagon favorites, usually World War II heroes
who had survived dangerous, death-defying missions, were rewarded with key
positions at Area 51. Men like Colonel Robert Holbury.

At Area 51, Holbury’s official title was air commander of the U.S. Air Force
Special Activities Squadron at Las Vegas, the nonclassified reference name for
Oxcart. A former fighter pilot during World War II, Holbury had been given a
commendation by General Patton for a dangerous low-flying reconnaissance
mission over the Saar River, in western Germany, which he survived despite
coming under heavy enemy fire. This meant Holbury was the official wing
commander at the base when Ken Collins crashed the first Oxcart spy plane. In
Air Force culture, when an airplane crashes, someone has to take the blame.
Collins explains: “In the SAC [Strategic Air Command] mind-set, if there’s an
accident, the wing commander suffers the consequences.” Instead, Collins
believes, Holbury tried to get Collins to be the fall guy. “Holbury didn’t want
blame; he wanted a star. He wanted to become a general, so he tried to put the
blame on me. After the crash, even before the investigation, he requested that I
be fired.”

Collins was unwilling to accept that. Fortunately for Collins’s career, Kelly
Johnson, the builder of the aircraft, didn’t care about blame as much as he
wanted to find out what had gone wrong with his airplane. Listening to Collins
describe what had happened during the debriefing, Johnson couldn’t figure out
what caused the aircraft to crash. He wondered if there was something Collins
had forgotten, or was maybe leaving out. “I was clear in my mind that the crash
was a mechanical error and not a pilot error,” Collins explains. “So when Kelly
Johnson asked would I try unconventional methods like hypnosis and truth
serum, I said yes. I was willing to do anything I could to get to the truth.” While
the Pentagon’s accident board conducted a traditional investigation, Collins

submitted to a far less conventional way of seeking out the truth of the cause of
the crash.

Inside the flight surgeon’s office at Lockheed, Collins sat with a CIA-
contracted hypnotist from Boston, “a small, rotund man dressed in a fancy suit,”
as Collins recalls. “He tried very hard to put me in a trance, only it didn’t work. I
don’t think he realized that hypnotizing a fighter pilot was not as easy as he
thought it might be.” Next, Collins was injected with sodium thiopental, also
known as truth serum. Collins remembers the day well. “I told my wife, Jane, I
was going to work for a few hours, which was unusual to begin with because it
was a Sunday. The point of the treatment was to see if I could remember details
other than those I relayed in the original debrief with the CIA. But yes, even
with the sodium pentothal in my system, everything I said was exactly the same.
The treatment takes a lot out of you and after it was over, I was very unsteady on
my feet. Three CIA agents brought me home late that Sunday evening. One
drove my car, the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I
was still loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without
saying a word.”

When Collins woke up the next morning, he figured the only conclusion his
wife could have drawn was that her husband had gone out on a Sunday and
gotten drunk. Feeling bad, he confided in her that he’d been given truth serum
and could not say anything more. Jane told her husband a story of her own. She
said that he didn’t have to explain further because she had a pretty good idea
what had happened to him on the job. Earlier in the week, Jane explained,
immediately after Collins’s crash, family friend and fellow Oxcart pilot Walt
Ray had broken protocol and called Jane from Area 51 to tell her that Ken had
bailed out of an airplane but that he was ah right. “Where is he?” Jane had asked.
Walt Ray said he didn’t know. Jane then asked, “How can you know if Ken is
okay if you don’t even know where he is?” At the time Walt Ray didn’t have an
answer for that. So now, hangover or no hangover, Jane Collins was happy to
have her husband home alive. After a lengthy investigation it was determined
that a tiny, pencil-size part called a pitot tube had in fact caused the crash . The
pitot tube measured the air coming into the aircraft and thereby controlled the
airspeed indicator. Unlike in a car, where the driver can feel relative speed, in a
plane, without a proper reading from an airspeed indicator, a pilot has no
awareness of how fast he is going, and without correct airspeed information a
pilot cannot land. When Collins flew into the cloud, the pitot tube reacted
adversely to the moisture inside and froze. The false airspeed indicator caused

the aircraft to stall. As a result of the stall, the Oxcart flipped upside down and
crashed.

Ken Collins’s crash in Utah caused the CIA to redouble its secrecy efforts
regarding operations at Area 51. The press was told an F-105 crashed, and as of
2011, the Air Force still has it listed that way. Worried its cover was about to be
blown, the Agency decided to shore up an accounting of who knew what about
Oxcart. An analyst was assigned the task of combing through all the files the
CIA had been keeping on journalists, civilians, and even retired Air Force
personnel—anyone who showed a curiosity about what might be going on at
Area 51. Beginning in the spring of 1963, the noted instances of what the CIA
called “Project Oxcart Awareness Outside Cleared Community” drastically
increased. Declassified in 2007 and never before made public, the CIA had been
monitoring phone conversations of journalists who seemed interested in the
Oxcart program. “Mr. Marvin Miles, Aviation Editor, Los Angeles Times,
telephonically contacted Westinghouse Corp., Pittsburgh, attempting to confirm
if employees of that firm were traveling covertly to ‘the desert’ each week in
connection with top secret Project which he suspects may have ‘CIA’
association,” read one memo. Another stated that “Mr. Robert Hotz, Editor
Aviation Week, indicated his awareness of developments at Burbank.” Of
particular concern to the Agency was an article in the Hartford Courant that
referred to the “secret development” of the J-58 engine. Another article in the
Fontana, California, paper the Herald News speculated about the existence of
Area 51, calling it a “super secret Project site.” An increasingly suspicious CIA
worked overtime to monitor journalists, and they also monitored regular citizens,
including a Los Angeles-based taxi driver who was described in a memo marked
“classified” as once having asked a Pratt and Whitney employee if he was “en
route to Nevada.”

With the Air Force steadily gaining a foothold in day-to-day operations at
Area 51, it was the Air Force that the CIA should have been watching more
closely in terms of the future of the spy plane program as a whole. It was not as
if there weren’t writing on the wall. In the year before Collins’s crash, the Air
Force had decided it wanted a Mach 3 Oxcart-type program of its own. Just as it
had with the U-2, the Pentagon moved in on the CIA’s spy plane territory. Only
with the Oxcart, the Air Force ordered not one but three Air Force variants for its
stable. One version, the YF-12A, would be used as an attack aircraft, its camera
bay retrofitted to hold two 250-kiloton nuclear bombs. The second Oxcart
variant the Air Force ordered could carry a drone on its back. The third was a

two-seater version of the CIA’s stealth spy plane, only instead of being designed
to conduct high-speed, high-altitude reconnaissance missions over enemy
territory during peacetime, the Air Force supersonic spy plane was meant to go
in and take pictures of enemy territory immediately after a nuclear strike by U.S.
bomber planes—to see if any strategic targets had been missed. Designated the
RS-71 Blackbird, this now-famous aircraft had its letter designation accidentally
inverted by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a public speech. Since the president
is rarely ever “corrected,” the Air Force changed its letter designation, which is
how the SR-71 Blackbird got its name. (Originally, the letters stood for
“Reconnaissance/Strike.” )

There was no end to the irony in all of this. The Air Force’s Mach 3 airplanes
were a far cry from President Eisenhower’s original idea to let the CIA create a
spy plane with which to conduct espionage missions designed to prevent nuclear
war. This new Air Force direction underscored the difference in the two services:
the CIA was in the business of spying, and the Air Force was in the business of
war.

There were other motives in play, including the ego of General Curtis LeMay.
The Air Force had already spent eight hundred mil lion dollars developing the B-
70 bomber airplane—a massive, triangle-shaped, Mach 3, eight-engined bomber
that had been General LeMay’s passion project since its inception in 1959. When
a fleet of eighty-five of these giant supersonic bombers was first proposed to
Congress, LeMay, then head of the Strategic Air Command, had his proposition
met with cheers. But the Gary Powers shoot-down in May of 1960 had exposed
the vulnerability of LeMay’s B-70 bombers, which would fly at the same height
as the U-2. In 1963 LeMay was no longer head of the Strategic Air Command—
instead, he was President Kennedy’s Air Force chief of staff. Despite evidence
showing the B-70 bomber was not a practical airplane, LeMay was not about to
give up his beloved bomber without a fight.

When the CIA first briefed President Kennedy on how high and how fast the
A-12 Oxcart would fly, the president was astonished . His first question,
according to CIA officer Norman Nelson, was “Could it be converted into a
long-range bomber to replace the B-70?” LeMay was in the room when Kennedy
asked the question. The thought of losing his pet program to the Agency drove
General LeMay wild. He lobbied the Pentagon to move forward with the B-70,
and he stepped up his public relations campaign, personally promoting the B-70
bomber program in magazine interviews from Aviation Week to Reader ’s Digest.
He was committed to appealing to as many Americans as possible, from aviation

buffs to housewives. But by 1963, Kennedy was leaning toward canceling the B-
70. In a budget message, he called it “unnecessary and economically
unjustifiable.” Congress cut back its B-70 order even further . The original order
for eighty-five had already been cut down to ten, and now Congress cut that to
four.

LeMay was furious. He flew from Washington, DC, to Burbank, California,
to see Kelly Johnson at the Skunk Works. Longtime rivals, Kelly Johnson
greeted LeMay with skepticism when LeMay asked for a briefing about the A-
12. After Johnson was finished, LeMay gave Johnson a quid pro quo. “ Johnson.

I want a promise out of you that you won’t lobby anymore against the B-70,”
LeMay said. Provided Kelly Johnson complied, LeMay promised to send
Lockheed an Air Force purchase order for an interceptor version of Lockheed’s
A-12 Oxcart, in addition to the preexisting order. For Lockheed, this would
mean a big new invoice to send to the Air Force. At first, Kelly Johnson was
suspicious of LeMay’s sincerity. That changed just a few weeks later when
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara showed up at the Skunk Works with the
secretary of the Air Force and the assistant secretary of defense in tow. Now
McNamara asked for a briefing on the A-12, during which he took “copious
notes.” Within a matter of months, the Pentagon ordered twenty-five more A-12
variants. The Pentagon already had a catchy name for its versions of the Oxcart.
They would call them Blackbirds. Black because they had been developed in the
dark by the CIA, and birds because they could fly. The meeting touched off the
long-running battle between the two agencies over control of Area 51 and
control of any U.S. government asset with wings. But this is exactly what had
happened with the U-2. The CIA did all of the heavy lifting to get the aircraft
aloft, only to have the program eventually taken over by the Pentagon for the Air
Force.

At the Ranch, it was business as usual . No one but the generals had any idea that
the CIA’s spy plane program now officially had in the Pentagon a formidable
rival that threatened its very existence. Instead, pilots, engineers, operators,
scientists, and Air Force enlisted men worked triple shifts, around the clock, to
get the A-12 Oxcart mission ready. These were the men who made up and
supported the 1129th Special Activities Squadron at Groom Lake.

The J-58 jet engines built by Pratt and Whitney had taken forever to finish
but now they were ready to fly. In January of 1963 they were finally delivered to

the Ranch . A host of new problems occurred when the engines were first
powered up. In one instance, engineers suspected a foreign object was stuck in
an engine’s heart, called the power plant, and was damaging internal parts. An
X-ray showed the outline of a pen that had fallen into the engine’s cover, called a
nacelle, during final assembly in Burbank. From then on, Lockheed workers got
coveralls without breast pockets. There were other problems. The engines
worked like giant vacuums. Once powered up on the tarmac, they sucked in
every loose object lying around, including rocks and metal screws. As a solution,
Area 51 workers took to sweeping and then vacuuming the runway before each
flight. It was a tedious but necessary job.

The next goal was to get the airplane to cruise at Mach 3. Nearly five times
as fast as any commercial airplane, this was an aerodynamic feat that had never
been accomplished before. Pushing through the lower Mach numbers was a
laborious and dangerous task. Performance margins were met gradually, with a
new set of challenges cropping up each day. As the airplane reached higher
speeds, the 500-plus-degree temperatures began melting electrical components,
many of which had to be redesigned and rewired. Chuck Yeager is credited with
breaking the sound barrier in 1947, but every time a new aircraft moves through
the speed of sound, which is 768 miles per hour, complications can arise. In the
case of the Oxcart, the sonic shock unexpectedly caused the fuselage to flex in
such a way that many structural parts became dangerously compromised. These
parts had to be redesigned and replaced.

Some performance benchmarks came surprisingly quickly. In July of 1963,
Lou Schalk flew briefly at Mach 3, much to the Agency’s delight. But sustaining
flight for ten minutes at Mach 3 took another seven months to achieve. Every
flight was like an operational mission, with navigators plotting a course and
making maps days before as they worked to test the Oxcart’s internal navigation
system, or INS. “When you’re flying at that altitude and that speed, you need big
checkpoints to validate information from the INS,” recalls navigator Sam Pizzo.
“Any old geographical landmark, like a mountain or a river, would not do. The
Oxcart traveled too fast. Pilots would have to look for landmarks on the scale of
the Grand Canyon or the Great Lakes,” says the veteran navigator. “You can’t
imagine what new territory this was for a navigator. No amount of experience
can prepare you when you work on an airplane that goes two or three times as
fast as anything you navigated for before.”

The essence of Area 51 was that everything that happened there happened
big. Because all efforts were being made on orders of the president, and given

the colossal scale of secrecy surrounding the project, there was a deeply patriotic
sense that the free world depended on the work being performed at Area 51. The
men worked tirelessly and with phenomenal ingenuity to overcome challenges
that would have stymied countless others. And yet the strange paradox
underlying all efforts at the Ranch was that Project Oxcart was also subject to
unforeseeable world events. It could be given the ax at a moment’s notice—
which is what almost happened on November 22, 1963.

It was late in the day after a rainstorm and Captain Donald Donohue was
working with a crew out on the dry lake bed. An F-101 chase plane had run off
the airstrip and sunk into a layer of gypsum that was several inches deep.
Working with a group of engineers and mechanics, Donohue led the efforts to
lay down several long planks of steel that could then be used to tow the airplane
out of where it had become stuck in the soggy lake bed.

“Pizzo came out,” Donohue remembers. “He looked kinda pale. Then he
said, ‘Clean up and go home.’ Well, something was not right. Sam Pizzo was a
lot more talkative than that. Then he said something to the effect of ‘We’ll call
you if we need you to come back.’”

“What the hell is going on?” Donohue remembers asking.

“President Kennedy has just been assassinated, in Dallas,” Pizzo said
solemnly.

It was a terrible shock, Donohue remembers. “Our commander in chief.
Dead? I recall it like it was yesterday. Pizzo was right. We had to go home and
wait this thing out. When [Lyndon] Johnson was vice president, he was entirely
unaware about the existence of the A-12 program. And he didn’t have a clue
about Area 51.” The future of Oxcart was contingent on the new president’s call.

With President Kennedy dead, Lyndon Johnson would be briefed on the
CIA’s secret domestic base by CIA director John McCone on his eighth day as
commander in chief. Until then, what Johnson would decide about the CIA’s
supersonic spy plane program was anybody’s guess. The relationship between a
new president and the CIA is always tenuous starting out. What happened to
President Kennedy with the CIA and the Bay of Pigs raised the bar in terms of
jeopardy for all future presidents of the United States. Only time would tell if
Lyndon Johnson would authorize the completion of the Agency’s Mach 3 spy
plane out at Area 51.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Covering Up the Cover-Up

Jim Freedman remembers the first time he brought up the subject of UFOs with
his EG&G supervisor at Area 51. It was sometime in the middle of the 1960s
and “UFOs were a pretty big thing,” Freedman explains. Flying saucer sightings
had made their way into the news with a fervor not seen since the late 1940s. “I
heard through the rumor mill that one of the UFOs had gone to Wright-Pat and
was then brought to a remote area of the test site,” Freedman says. “ I heard it
was in Area 22 . 1 was driving with my supervisor through the test site one day
and I told him what I had heard and I asked him what he thought about that.

Well, he just kept looking at the road. And then he turned to me and he said,

‘Jim, I don’t want to hear you mention anything like that, ever again, if you want
to keep your job.”’ Freedman made sure never to bring the subject of UFOs up
again when he was at work.

In the mid-1960s, sightings of unidentified flying objects around Area 51
reached unprecedented heights as the A-12 Oxcart flying from Groom Lake was
repeatedly mistaken for a UFO. Not since the U-2 had been flying from there
were so many UFO reports being dumped on CIA analysts’ desks. The first
instance happened only four days after Oxcart’s first official flight, on April 30,
1962. It was a little before 10:00 a.m., and a NASAX-15 rocket plane was
making a test flight in the air corridor that ran from Dryden Flight Research
Center, in California, to Ely, Nevada, during the same period of time when an A-
12 was making a test flight in the vicinity at a different altitude. From inside the
X-15 rocket plane, test pilot Joe Walker snapped photographs, a task that was
part of his mission flight. The X-15 was not a classified program and NASA
often released publicity photographs taken during flights, as they did with

Walker’s photographs that day. But NASA had not scrutinized the photos closely
before their public release, and officials missed the fact that a tiny “UFO”
appeared in the corner of one of Walker’s pictures. In reality, it was the Oxcart,
but the press identified it as a UFO. A popular theory among ufologists about
why aliens would want to visit Earth in the first place has to do with Earthlings’
sudden advance of technologies beginning with the atomic bomb. For this group,
it follows that the X-15—the first manned vehicle to get to the edge of space (the
highest X-15 flight was 354.200 feet—almost 67 miles above sea level) would
be particularly interesting to beings from outer space.

Two weeks after the incident, the CIA’s new director, John McCone, received
a secret, priority Teletype on the matter stating that “ on 30 April. A-12 was in air
at altitude of 30,000 feet from 0948-106 local with concurrent X-15 Test” and
that “publicity releases mention unidentified objects on film taken on X-15
flight.” This message, which was not declassified until 2007, illustrates the kind
of UFO-related reports that inundated the CIA at this time. In total, 2,850 Oxcart
flights would be flown out of Area 51 over a period of six years. Exactly how
many of these flights generated UFO reports is not known, but the ones that
prompted UFO sightings created the same kinds of problems for the CIA as they
had in the previous decade with the U-2, only with elements that were seemingly
more inexplicable. With Oxcart, commercial airline pilots flying over Nevada or
California would look up and see the shiny, reflective bottom of the Oxcart
whizzing by high overhead at triple-sonic speeds and think, UFO. How could
they not? When the Oxcart flew at 2,300 miles per hour, it was going
approximately five times faster than a commercial airplane—aircraft speeds that
were unheard-of in those days. Most Oxcart sightings came right after sunset,
when the lower atmosphere was shadowed in dusk. Seventeen miles higher up,
the sun was still shining brightly on the Oxcart. The spy plane’s broad titanium
wings coupled with its triangle-shaped rear fuselage—reflecting the sun’s rays
higher in the sky than aircraft were known to fly—could understandably cause
alarm.

The way the CIA dealt with this new crop of sightings was similar to how it
handled the U-2s’. Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, Area 51’s base commander
during this time, explains “ commercial pilots would report sightings to the FAA.
The flights would be met in California, or wherever they landed, by FBI agents
who would make passengers sign inadvertent disclosure forms.” End of story, or
so the CIA hoped. Instead, interest in UFOs only continued to grow. The public
again put pressure on Congress to find out if the federal government was

involved in covering up UFOs. When individual congressmen asked the CIA if it
was involved in UFOs, the Agency would always say no.

On May 10, 1966, the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite. hosted
a CBS news special report called UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy? To an audience
of millions of Americans, Cronkite announced that the CIA was part of a
government cover-up regarding UFOs. The CIA had been actively analyzing
UFO data despite repeatedly denying to Congress that it was doing so, Cronkite
said. He was absolutely correct. The Agency had been tracking UFO sightings
around the world since the 1950s and actively lying about its interest in them.
The CIA could not reveal the classified details of the U-2 program—the
existence of which had been outed by the Gary Powers shoot-down but the
greater extent of which would remain classified until 1998—nor could it reveal
anything related to the Oxcart program and those sightings. That remained top
secret until 2007. In Cronkite’s expose, the CIA looked like liars.

It got worse for the Agency. The Cronkite program also reopened a twelve-
year-old can of UFO worms known as the Robertson Panel report of 1953. Dr.
Robertson appeared on a CBS Reports program and disclosed that the UFO
inquiry bearing his name had in fact been sponsored by the CIA beginning in
1952, despite repeated denials by officials. The House Armed Services
Committee held hearings on UFOs in July of 1966, which resulted in the Air
Force laying blame for the cover-up on the CIA . “The Air Force... approached
the Agency for declassification,” testified secretary of the Air Force Harold
Brown. Brown stated that while there was no evidence that “strangers from outer
space” had been visiting Earth, it was time for the CIA to come clean on its
secret studies regarding UFOs.

According to CIA historian Gerald Haines . “The Agency again refused to
budge. Karl H. Weber, Deputy Director of OSI [Office of Scientific
Intelligence], wrote the Air Force that ‘we are most anxious that further publicity
not be given to the information that the panel was sponsored by the CIA.’”
Weber’s words, said Haines, were “shortsighted and ill considered” because the
Air Force in turn gave that information to a journalist named John Lear , the
science editor of the Saturday Review. Lear’s September 1966 article “The
Disputed CIA Document on UFO’s” put yet another spotlight on the CIA’s
ongoing cover-up of UFOs. Lear, unsympathetic to the idea of extraterrestrials,
demanded the release of the report. The CIA held firm that its information was
classified, and the full, unsanitized facts regarding the Agency’s role in
unidentified flying objects remains classified as of 2011.

The public was outraged by the layers of obfuscation. The year 1966 was the
height of the Vietnam War, and the federal government’s ability to tell the truth
was under fire. Pressure on Congress to make more information known did not
let up. And so once again, as it had been in the late 1940s, the Air Force was
officially “put in charge” of investigating individual UFO claims. The point of
having the Air Force in charge, said Congress, was to oversee the untrustworthy
CIA. One of the great ironies at work in this was that only a handful of Air Force
generals were cleared for knowledge about Oxcart flights blazing in and out of
Area 51, which meant that to most Air Force investigators, Oxcart sightings
were in fact unidentified flying objects. Further feeding public discord, several
key Air Force officials who had previously been involved in investigating UFOs
now believed the Air Force was also engaged in covering up UFOs. Several of
these men left government service to write books about UFOs and help the
public persuade Congress to do more.

For more than two hundred years, since the invention of the hot-air balloon,
people all over the world have been terrified of unidentified flying objects
because their very existence makes man feel vulnerable from an attack from
above. The War of the Worlds radio-broadcast phenomenon was far from the first
such incident. The first pictorially recorded panic over a UFO event occurred in
August of 1783, shortly after two French brothers named Joseph and Etienne
Montgolfier secured patronage from the king of France to design and fly a hot¬
air balloon—the eighteenth-century version of a modern-day defense contract.
During one of the Montgolfiers’ early flight tests, a balloon got caught in a
thunderstorm and crashed in a small French village called Gonesse. The peasants
that inhabited the town thought the balloon was a monster attacking them from
the sky. A pen-and-ink drawing from that time shows men with pitchforks and
scythes ripping the crashed balloon to shreds. Townsfolk in the background can
be seen running away, flailing their arms above their heads in fear. From this
story, it is easy to see that with any new form of flight comes the archetypal fear
of an attack from above. In the more than two hundred years since, these fears
have taken dramatic twists and turns.

Twenty years into the American jet age, in the mid-1960s, fears of
unidentified flying objects continued to shape cultural thinking and spawn
industries. By then, millions of Americans correctly believed that various
factions inside the U.S. government were actively engaged in a cover-up

regarding UFOs. Many citizens believed the government was trying to cover up
the existence of extraterrestrial beings; people did not consider the fact that by
overfocusing on Martians, they would pay less attention to other UFO realities,
namely, that these were sightings of radical aircraft made by men. By the late
1960s, the two government agencies at the forefront of citizens’ wrath—the CIA
and the Air Force—had been using cover and deception as tools to keep
classified programs out of the public eye. Cover conceals the truth, and
deception conveys false information. From cover stories about airplane crashes
to deception campaigns about covert UFO study programs, both organizations
had created complex webs of lies. How exactly a deception campaign works on
ordinary people is best exemplified by this factual, dawn-of-the-jet-age U.S.
Army Air Corps tale.

In 1942, when the jet engine was first being developed, the Army Air Corps
desired to keep the radical new form of flight a secret until the military was
ready to unveil the technology on its own terms. Before the jet engine, airplanes
flew by propellers, and before 1942, for most people it was a totally foreign
concept for an airplane to fly without the blades of a propeller spinning around.
With the jet engine, in order to maintain silence on this technological
breakthrough, the Army Air Corps entered into a rather benign strategic
deception campaign involving a group of its pilots. Every time a test pilot took a
Bell XP-59A jet aircraft out on a flight test over the Muroc dry lake bed in
California’s Mojave Desert, the crew attached a dummy propeller to the
airplane’s nose first. The Bell pilots had a swath of airspace in which to perform
flight tests but every now and then a pilot training on a P-38 Lightning would
cruise into the adjacent vicinity to try to get a look at the airplane. The airplane
was seen trailing smoke, and eventually, rumors started to circulate at local pilot
bars. Pilots wanted to know what was being hidden from them.

According to Edwards Air Force Base historian Dr. James Young, the chief
XP-59A Bell test pilot, a man by the name of Jack Woolams, got an idea. He
ordered a gorilla mask from a Hollywood prop house. On his next flight,
Woolams removed the mock-up propeller from the nose of his jet airplane and
put on the gorilla mask. When a P-38 Lightning came flying nearby for a look,
Woolams maneuvered his airplane close enough so that the P-38 pilot could look
inside the cockpit of the jet plane. The Lightning pilot was astonished. Instead of
seeing Woolams, the pilot saw a gorilla flying an airplane—an airplane that had
no propeller. The stunned pilot landed and went straight to the local bar, where
he sat down and ordered a stiff drink. There, he began telling other pilots what

he had definitely seen with his own eyes. His colleagues told him he was drunk,
that what he was saying was an embarrassment, and that he should go home.
Meanwhile, the concept of the gorilla mask caught on among other Bell XP-59A
test pilots and soon Woolams’s colleagues joined the act. Over the course of the
next few months, other P-38 Lightning pilots spotted the gorilla flying the
propellerless airplane. Some versions of the historical record have the
psychiatrist for the U.S. Army Air Corps getting involved, helping the Lightning
pilots to understand how a clear-thinking fighter pilot could become disoriented
at altitude and believe he had seen something that clearly was not really there.
Everyone knows that a gorilla can’t fly an airplane. Whether or not the
psychiatrist really did get involved—and if he did, whether he was aware of the
gorilla masks—remains ambiguous to Dr. Craig Luther, a contemporary
historian at Edwards Air Force Base. But for the purposes of a strategic
deception campaign, the point is clear: no one wants to be mistaken for a fool.

Ockham’s razor is an idea attributed to a fourteenth-century English friar named
William of Ockham. It asks when trying to explain a phenomenon, does the
alternative story explain more evidence than the principal story, or is it just a
more complicated and therefore a less useful explanation of the same evidence?
In other words, according to Ockham, when man is presented with a riddle, the
answer to the riddle should be simpler, not more complicated, than the riddle
itself. Ockham’s razor is often applied to the phenomenon of unidentified flying
objects, or UFOs. In the case of the flying-gorilla story, the true explanation—
that the gorilla was actually a pilot with a gorilla mask on—offered the simplest
answer to what appeared to be an inexplicable phenomenon. The same can be
said about the truth regarding the Roswell crash. But it would take decades for
more to be revealed.

One of the more enigmatic figures involved in the Roswell mystery was Rear
Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the first man to run the CIA. Hillenkoetter was
the director of Central Intelligence from May 1, 1947, until October 7, 1950.
After his retirement from the CIA, Hillenkoetter returned to a career in the navy.
Curiously, after he retired from the Navy, in the late 1950s, he served on the
board of governors of a group of UFO researchers called the National
Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Hillenkoetter’s placement on
the board was a paradox. He was there, in part, to learn what the UFO
researchers knew about unidentified flying crafts. But he also empathized with

their work. While Hillenkoetter did not believe UFOs were from outer space, he
knew unidentified flying objects were a serious national security concern. In his
position as CIA director Hillenkoetter knew that the flying disc at Roswell had
been sent by Joseph Stalin. And he knew of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s fear that
what had been achieved once could happen again. Which makes it peculiar that,
in February of 1960, in a rare reveal by a former cabinet-level official,
Hillenkoetter testified to Congress that he was dismayed at how the Air Force
was handling UFOs. To the Senate Science and Astronautics Committee he
stated that “behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly
concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens
are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” He also claimed
that “to hide the facts, the Air Force has silenced its personnel.”

Hillenkoetter remained a ranking member of the National Investigations
Committee on Aerial Phenomena until 1962, when he mysteriously resigned .
Equally puzzling was that the man who later replaced Hillenkoetter and became
the head of the board of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial
Phenomena in 1969 was Joseph Bryan III—the CIA’s first chief of political and
psychological warfare. Not much is known about Bryan’s true role with the
ufologists because his work at the CIA remains classified as of 2011. If his name
sounds familiar, it is because Joe Bryan was the man scheduled for a hunting trip
with Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell’s friend and predecessor at the CIA. But
before Bryan arrived that day, on October 29, 1965, Wisner shot himself in the
head.

At the CIA, during the mid-1960s, the thinking regarding UFOs began to
move in a different direction. Since the birth of the modern UFO phenomenon,
in June of 1947, the CIA had maintained three lines of thought on UFOs . They
were (a) experimental aircraft, (b) the delusions of a paranoid person’s mind, or
(c) part of a psychological warfare campaign by the Soviet Union to create panic
among the people and sow seeds of governmental mistrust. But by 1966, a
faction within the CIA added a fourth line of thought to its concerns: maybe
UFOs were real. This new postulation came from the Agency’s monitoring of
circumstances in the Soviet Union, which was also in the midst of a UFO sea
change.

In the 1940s and until Stalin’s death in 1953, CIA analysts of Soviet
publications had found only one known mention of UFOs, in an editorial
published in a Moscow newspaper in 1951. Khrushchev appeared to have
continued the policy. The analysts at CIA assigned to monitor the Soviet press

during his tenure found no stories about UFOs. But curiously, in 1964, after
Khrushchev’s colleagues removed him from power and installed Leonid
Brezhnev in his place, articles on UFOs began to emerge. In 1966, a series of
articles about UFOs were published by Novosti, Moscow’s official news agency.
Two leading scientists from the Moscow Aviation Institute not only were writing
about UFOs but were split on their opinions about them, which was highly
unusual for Soviet state-funded scientists. One of the scientists, Villen
Lvustiberg . promoted the idea that UFOs were the creation of the American
government and that “the U.S. publicizes them to divert people from its failures
and aggressions.” A second leading scientist, Dr. Felix Zigel. had come to
believe that UFOs were in fact real.

Declassified CIA memos written during this time reveal a concern that if the
leading scientists and astronomers in the Soviet Union believed UFOs were real,
maybe UFOs truly were real after all. In 1968, the CIA learned that a Soviet air
force general named Porfiri Stolyarov had been named the chairman of a new
“UFO Section of the All-Union Cosmonautics Committee” in Moscow. After
learning that Russia had an official UFO committee, the CIA went scrambling
for its own science on UFOs. For the first time in its history, America’s spy
agency internally allowed for the fact that UFOs might in fact be coming from
outer space. “ The hypothesis that UFOs originate in other worlds , that they are
flying craft from other planets other than Earth, merits the most serious
examination,” read one secret memo that was circulated among CIA analysts.

Had the original UFO cover-up—the crash of the Horten brothers’ flying disc
at Roswell—created this Hydra-like monster? Had maintaining secrecy around
the follow-up program, which had been clandestinely set up in the Nevada desert
just outside Area 51, resulted in such endemic paranoia among analysts at the
CIA that these individuals sensed they were being lied to? That the dark secret
the government was hiding was that UFOs really were from outer space? Or was
an elite group with a need-to-know allowing—perhaps even fostering—exactly
this kind of conjecture among analysts because it was better to have insiders on a
wild-goose chase than to have them on the trail leading to the original enigma of
Area 51?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Dull. Dirty, and Dangerous Requires Drones

Starting in 1963, preparing for Oxcart missions involved punishing survival¬
training operations for the pilots, many of which occurred in the barren outer
reaches of Area 51. For Ken Collins, a mock nighttime escape from an aircraft
downed over the desert was meant to simulate hell. Collins knew the kind of
challenge he would be up against as he stood on the tarmac at Groom Lake
watching the sun disappear behind the mountains to the west. Soon, it would be
dark and very cold. Collins climbed into a C-47 aircraft and noticed that the
windows were blacked out. Neither he nor any of the other Oxcart pilots he was
with had any idea where they were headed. “We got inside and flew for a little
while,” Collins recalls, “until we landed in another desert airfield, somewhere
remote.” The men were unloaded from the aircraft and put into a van, also with
the windows blacked out. They were driven for miles, Collins thought going in
circles, until the doors of the van opened into what appeared to be thick, rough,
high-desert terrain. “We were told that we were in Chinese enemy territory. To
escape and survive the best that you can. There were electronic alarms, trip
wires, and explosive charges on the ground.”

Collins ran and took cover under a bush. In the darkness, he lay on his belly
and gathered his thoughts. He had been through a series of survival trials during
Oxcart training already. Once, he and another pilot were taken to the Superstition
Mountains in Arizona for a mountain-survival trial. “On that exercise we had
minimal food, sleeping bags, and a very small tent. We walked and camped in
the mountains for five days. The first three days were comfortable; the third
night a weather front moved in with cold rain,” making things a little more
challenging. A second exercise took place in Kings Canyon, in the Sierra

Mountains. During that trip, Collins and another pilot had to live in snow for
three days. They dug a snow cave and made beds of pine boughs. A third trip, to
Florida, simulated jungle survival . “I was taken out to a swamp, given a knife,
and told to survive on my own for four days.” What Collins remembers vividly
was the food. “I caught some turtles to eat, but found them difficult to open, so
my staple became the heart of palm. I’d cut the new palm buds out from the
center. It was thin fare, but sustainable,” Collins says. But the high-desert
survival training at Area 51 felt different. Unlike the other sessions, this one
would involve psychological warfare by the mock enemy Chinese.

Collins crawled along the desert floor through the darkness, feeling for the
trip wires and considering his next move. He pulled his small compass from his
survival pack so he could chart a path. “I crawled slowly through the brambles,
bugs, and mud for about thirty minutes when, suddenly, I hit a trip wire and
alarms went off. A glaring spotlight came on and ten Chinese men in uniform
grabbed me and dragged me to one of their jeeps.” Collins was handcuffed,
driven for a while, put into a second vehicle, and taken to so-called Chinese
interrogation headquarters. There, he was stripped naked and searched. “A
doctor proceeded to examine every orifice the human body has, from top to
bottom—literally,” which, Collins believes, “was more to humiliate and break
down my moral defenses than anything else.” Naked, he was led down a dimly
lit hallway and pushed into a concrete cell furnished with a short, thin bed made
of wood planks. “I had no blanket, I was naked, and it was very cold. They gave
me a bucket to be used only when I was told.”

For days, Collins went through simulated torture that included sleep
deprivation, humiliation, extreme temperature fluctuation, and hunger, all the
while naked, cold, and under surveillance by his captors. “The cell had one thick
wooded door with a hole for viewing. This opening had a metal window that
would clank open and shut. A single bright light was on and when I was about to
doze off, the light would flash off, which would immediately snap me out of
sleep.” For food, he was given watery soup, two thin pepper pods, and two bits
of mysterious meat. “I had no water to drink and I was always watched. I didn’t
know day from night so there was no sense of time. The temperature varied from
hot to very cold. The voice through the viewing window shouted demands.”

Soon Collins began to hallucinate. Now it was interrogation time. Naked, he
was led to a small room by two armed guards. He stood in front of his Chinese
interrogators, who sat behind a small desk. They grilled him about his name,
rank, and why he was spying on China. The torturous routine continued for what

Collins guessed was several more days. Then one day, instead of being taken to
his interrogators, he was told that he was free to go.

But halfway across the world, on November 1, 1963, Ken Collins’s
experience was being mirrored for real. A CIA pilot named Yeh Changti had
been flying a U-2 spy mission over a nuclear facility in China when he was shot
down, captured by the Chinese Communist government, and tortured. Yeh
Changti was a member of the Thirty-Fifth Black Cat U-2 Squadron, a group of
Taiwanese Chinese Nationalist pilots (as opposed to the Communist Chinese,
who inhabited the mainland) who worked covert espionage missions for the
CIA. In the 1960s, the Black Cats flew what would prove to be the deadliest
missions in the U-2’s fifty-five-year history, all of which were flown out of a
secret base called Taoyuan on the island of Taiwan. When the CIA declassified
most of the U-2 program, in 1998, “ no information was released about Yeh
Changti or the Black Cats,” says former Black Cat pilot Hsichun Hua. The
program, in entirety, remains classified as of 2011.

Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, the man who would later become the commander
of Area 51, remembers Yeh Changti before he got shot down. “ His code name
was Terry Lee and he and I played tennis on the base at Taoyuan all the time. He
was a great guy and an amazing acrobat, which helped him on the court.
Sometimes we drank scotch while we played. Both the sport and the scotch
helped morale.” Slater says that the reason morale was low was that “the U-2
had become so vulnerable to the SA-2 missiles that nobody wanted to fly.” One
Black Cat pilot had already been shot down. But that didn’t stop the dangerous
missions from going forward for the CIA.

Unlike what had happened with the Gary Powers shoot-down, the American
press remained in the dark about these missions. For the CIA, getting hard
intelligence on China’s nuclear facilities was a top national security priority. On
the day Yeh Changti was shot down, he was returning home from a nine-hour
mission over the mainland when a surface-to-air missile guidance system locked
on to his U-2. Colonel Slater was on the radio with Yeh Changti when it
happened. “I was talking to him when I heard him say, 'System 12 on!’ We never
heard another word.” The missile hit Yeh Changti’s aircraft and tore off the right
wing. Yeh Changti ejected from the airplane, his body riddled in fifty-nine places
with missile fragments. He landed safely with his parachute and passed out.
When he woke up, he was in a military facility run by Mao Tse-tung.

This was no training exercise. Yeh Changti was tortured and held prisoner for
nineteen years until he was quietly released by his captors, in 1982. He has been

living outside Houston, Texas, ever since. The CIA did not know that Yeh
Changti had survived his bailout and apparently did not make any kind of effort
to locate him. A second Black Cat pilot named Major Jack Chang would also get
shot down in a U-2, in 1965, and was imprisoned alongside Yeh Changti. After
their release, the two pilots shared their arduous stories with fellow Black Cat
pilot, Hsichun Hua, who had become a general in the Taiwanese air force while
the men were in captivity. Neither Yeh Changti nor Major Jack Chang was ever
given a medal by the CIA. The shoot-down of the Black Cat U-2 pilots,
however, had a major impact on what the CIA and the Air Force would do next
at Area 51. Suddenly, the development of drones had become a national security
priority, drones being pilotless aircraft that could be flown by remote control.

Drones could accomplish what the U-2 could in terms of bringing home
photographic intelligence, but a drone could do it without getting pilots captured
or killed. Ideally, drones could perform missions that fell into three distinct
categories: dull, dirty, and dangerous . Dull meant long flights during which
pilots faced fatigue flying to remote areas of the globe. Dirty included situations
where nuclear weapons or biological weapons might be involved. Dangerous
meant missions over denied territories such as the Soviet Union, North Korea,
and China, where shoot-downs were a political risk. Lockheed secured a contract
to develop such an unmanned vehicle in late 1962. After Yeh Changti’s shoot-
down, the program got a big boost. Flight-testing of the drone code-named
Tagboard would take place at Area 51 and, ironically, getting the Lockheed
drone to fly properly was among the first duties assigned to Colonel Slater after
he left Taoyuan and was given a new assignment at Area 51.

“Lockheed’s D-21 wasn’t just any old drone, it was the world’s first Mach 3
stealth drone,” says Lockheed physicist Ed Lovick, who worked on the program.
“The idea of this drone was a radical one because it would fly at least as fast, if
not faster, than the A-12. It had a ram jet engine, which meant it was powered by
forced air. The drone could only be launched off an aircraft that was already
moving faster than the speed of sound.” The A-12 mother ship was designated
M-21, M as in mother, and was modified to include a second seat for the drone
launch operator, a flight engineer. The D-21 was the name for the drone, the D
standing for daughter. But launching one aircraft from the back of another
aircraft at speeds of more than 2,300 mph had its own set of challenges,
beginning with how not to have the two aircraft crash into each other during
launch. The recovery process of the drone also needed to be fine-tuned. Lovick
explains, “The drone, designed to overfly China, would travel on its own flight

path taking reconnaissance photographs and then head back out to sea .” The idea
was to have the drone drop its photo package, which included the camera, the
film, and the radio sensors, by parachute so it could be retrieved by a second
aircraft nearby. Once the pallet was secure, the drone would crash into the sea
and sink to the ocean floor.

Practicing this process at Area 51 translated into a lot of lost drones. Colonel
Slater directed the test missions, which took place in what was called the special
operating area, or Yuletide . just north of Groom Lake airspace. Colonel Slater
and Frank Murray would follow the M-21/D-21 in chase planes and oversee the
subsonic launches of the drone. “They’d launch, and then disappear,” Colonel
Slater recalls. Helicopter pilot Charlie Trapp was sent to find them, along with a
crew of search-and-rescue parajumpers, called PJs. “First, we’d locate the lost
drones. Then I’d lower my parajumpers down on ropes. They’d hook the lost
pods to a cargo hook and we’d pull the drones off the mountain that way,” Trapp
explains. “Sometimes it got tricky, especially if the drone crash-landed on the
top of a mountain ridge. We had some tense times with PJs nearly falling off
cliffs .” When Colonel Slater felt the Oxcart and its drone were ready for a Mach
3 test, it was time to add ocean-survival training to the mix. For public safety
reasons, the plan was to launch the triplesonic drone off the coast of California in
March of 1966 for the first test, and to prepare his pilots, Colonel Slater had
them swim laps each day in the Area 51 pool, first in bathing suits and then with
their pressure suits on. “We’d hoist the guys up over the water in a pulley and
then drop them in the pool. As soon as they hit the water the first time, the
pressure suit inflated, so we had to have that fixed,” Slater recalls. When it came
time to practice an actual landing in a large body of water, the Agency’s highest-
ranking officer on base, Werner Weiss, got the Coast Guard to seal off a large
section of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir of water in the United States, located
just east of Las Vegas.

Slater remembers the pilot training well. “We were out there in this little
Boston Whaler and the plan was to get the project pilots hoisted up into a
parasail and then let them drop down in the water in their full pressure suits.

First [Agency pilot Mele] Vojvodich went. His test went fine. By the time we got
[Agency pilot Jack] Layton up, the wind had picked up. When Layton went
down in the water, the Whaler started dragging him, and the water in his
parachute started pulling him underneath. I called it off. 'Stop!’ I said. ‘We’re
gonna lose somebody out here!”’

They were prescient words. On the night of July 30, 1966, the 1129th Special

Activities Squadron at Groom Lake prepared to make the first official nighttime
drone launch off the coast of California. From the tarmac at Area 51, Lockheed’s
chief flight test pilot, Bill Park, was about to close the canopy on the M-21
Oxcart when Colonel Slater approached him with some final words. “I said,

‘Bill, it’s a dangerous mission,”’ Slater remembers. “There were only a few feet
between the drone and the tail of the A-12. Park knew that. We all did. In back
was the flight engineer. Ray Torick : he knew that too. The canopy closed and I
got into another Mach 3 aircraft we had flying alongside during the test.” Both
aircraft flew west until they were a hundred and fifty miles off the coast of
California. There, the M-21, piloted by Bill Park, prepared for the D-21 launch.
A camera in Slater’s airplane would capture the launch on 16-millimeter film.
Down below, on the dark ocean surface, a rescue boat waited. Park hit Ignite,
and the drone launched up and off the M-21. But during separation, the drone
pitched down instead of up and instantly split the mother aircraft in half.
Miraculously, the drone hit neither Park nor Torick, who were both trapped
inside.

The crippled aircraft began to tumble through the sky, falling for nearly ten
thousand feet. Somehow, both men managed to eject. Alive and now outside the
crashing, burning airplane, both men were safely tethered to their parachutes.
Remarkably, neither of the men was hit by the burning debris falling through the
air. Both men made successful water landings. But, as Slater recalls, an
unforeseen tragedy occurred. “Our rescue boat located Bill Park, who was fine.
But by the time the boat got to Ray Torick, he was tied up in his lanyard and had
drowned.”

Kelly Johnson was devastated. “ He impulsively and emotionally decided to
cancel the entire program and give back the development funding to the Air
Force and the Agency,” Johnson’s deputy Ben Rich recalled in his 1994 memoir
about the Lockheed Skunk Works. Rich asked Johnson why. “I will not risk any
more test pilots or Blackbirds. I don’t have either to spare,” Johnson said. But
the Air Force did not let the Mach 3 drone program go away so quickly. They
created a new program to launch the drone from underneath a B-52 bomber,
which was part of Strategic Air Command. President Johnson’s deputy secretary
of defense, Cyrus Vance, told Kelly Johnson, “We need this program to work
because our government will never again allow a Francis Gary Powers situation
develop. All our overflights over denied territory will either be with satellites or
drones.”

Three years later, in 1969, the D-21 drone finally made its first

reconnaissance mission, over China, launched off a B-52. The drone flew into
China and over the Lop Nur nuclear facility but had then somehow strayed off
course into Soviet Siberia, run out of fuel, and crashed. The suggestion was that
the drone’s guidance system had failed on the way home, and it was never seen
or heard from again. At least, not for more than twenty years. In the early 1990s,
a CIA officer showed up in Ben Rich’s office at Skunk Works with a mysterious
present for him. “Ben, do you recognize this?” the man asked Rich as he handed
him a hunk of titanium. “Sure I do,” Rich said. What Ben Rich was holding in
his hand was a piece of composite material loaded with the radar-absorbing
coating that Lovick and his team had first developed for Lockheed four decades
before. Asked where he got it, the CIA officer explained that it had been a gift to
the CIA from a KGB agent in Moscow. The agent had gotten it from a shepherd
in Siberia, who’d found it in the Siberian tundra while herding his sheep.
According to Rich, “The Russians mistakenly believed that this generation-old
panel signified our current stealth technology. It was, in a way, a very nice
tribute to our work on Tagboard.”

The use of drones in warfare has its origins in World War II. Joseph Kennedy Jr.,
President Kennedy’s older brother, died in a secret U.S. Navy drone operation
against the Germans. The covert mission, dubbed Operation Aphrodite , targeted
a highly fortified Nazi missile site inside Germany. The plan was for the older
Kennedy to pilot a modified B-24 bomber from England and over the English
Channel while his crew armed 22,000 pounds of explosives piled high in the
cargo hold. Once the explosives were wired, the crew and pilot needed to
quickly bail out. Flying not far away, a mother ship would begin remotely
controlling the unmanned aircraft as soon as the crew bailed out. Inside the
bomber’s nose cone were two cameras that would help guide the drone into its
Nazi target.

The explosive being used was called Torpex, a relatively new and extremely
volatile chemical compound. Just moments before Joseph Kennedy Jr. and his
crew bailed out, the Torpex caught fire, and the aircraft exploded midair, killing
everyone on board. The Navy ended its drone program, but the idea of a pilotless
aircraft caught the eye of general of the Army Henry “Hap” Arnold. On Victory
over Japan Day, General Arnold made a bold assertion. “The next war may be
fought by airplanes with no men in them at all,” he said. He was off by four
wars, but otherwise he was right.

The idea behind using remotely piloted vehicles in warfare is a simple one—
keep the human out of harm’s way—but the drone’s first application was for
pleasure. Nikola Tesla mastered wireless communication in 1893, years before
any of his fellow scientists were even considering such a thing. At the Electrical
Exhibition in Madison Square Garden in 1898, Tesla gave a demonstration in
which he directed a four-foot-long steel boat using radio remote control.
Audiences were flabbergasted. Tesla’s pilotless boat seemed to many to be more
a magic act than the scientific breakthrough it was. Ever a visionary, Tesla also
foresaw a military application for his invention. “I called an official in
Washington with a view of offering him the information to the government and
he burst out laughing upon telling him what I had accomplished,” Tesla wrote.
This made unfortunate sense—the military was still using horses for transport at
the time. Tesla’s friend writer Mark Twain also envisioned a military future in
remote control and offered to act as Tesla’s agent in peddling the “destructive
terror which you have been inventing.” Twain suggested the Germans might be
good clients, considering that, at the time, they were the most scientifically
advanced country in the world. In the end, no government bought Tesla’s
invention or paid for his patents. The great inventor died penniless in a New
York hotel room in 1943, and by then, the Germans had developed remote
control on their own and were wreaking havoc on ground forces across Europe.
The Germans’ first war robot was a remote-controlled minitank called Goliath,
and it was about the size of a bobsled. Goliath carried 132 pounds of explosives ,
which the Nazis drove into enemy bunkers and tanks using remote control. Eight
thousand Goliaths were built and used in battle by the Germans, mostly on the
Eastern Front, where Russian soldiers outnumbered German soldiers nearly three
to one. With no soldiers to spare, the Germans needed to keep the ones they had
out of harm’s way.

In America, the Army Air Forces developed its first official drone wing after
the war, for use during Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in 1946. There,
drones were sent through the mushroom cloud, their operators flying them by
remote control from an airborne mother ship called Marmalade flying nearby. To
collect radioactive samples, the drones had been equipped with air-collection
bags and boxlike filter-paper holders. Controlling the drones in such conditions
was difficult. Inside the mushroom cloud, one drone, code-named Fox, was
blasted “sixty feet higher than its flight path,” according to declassified memos
about the drone wing’s performance there. Fox’s “bomb doors warped, all the
cushions inside the aircraft burst and its inspection plates and escape hatch blew

off.” Remarkably, the drone pilot maintained control from several miles away.
Had he witnessed such a thing, Nikola Tesla might have smiled.

During the second set of atomic tests, called Operation Sandstone , in April of
1948, the drones were again used in a job deemed too dangerous for airmen.
During an eighteen-kiloton atomic blast called Zebra, however, a manned
aircraft accidentally flew through a mushroom cloud, and after this, the Air
Force made the decision that because the pilot and crew inside the aircraft had
“suffered no ill effects,” pilots should be flying atomic-sampling missions, not
drones. Whether or not pilots were exposed to lethal amounts of radiation during
the Zebra bomb or hundreds of other atomic tests has never been accurately
determined. The majority of the records regarding how much radiation pilots
were exposed to in these early years and who died of radiation-related diseases
have allegedly been destroyed or lost. But when the Air Force pilot accidentally
flew through the Zebra bomb’s mushroom cloud , the incident “commenced a
chain of events that resulted in manned samplers.”

“Manned samplers were simply more efficient,” wrote officer Colonel Paul
H. Fackler in a 1963 classified historical review of atomic cloud sampling made
for the Air Force systems command, declassified in 1986. As the official
radiation safety officer assigned to Operation Sandstone, Fackler held sway.
Fackler’s colleague Colonel Cody also argued in favor of man over drone. Cody
said the drone samples were obtained haphazardly by “potluck.” A human pilot
would be able to maneuver around a cloud during penetration so that the “most
likely parts of the cloud could be sampled.” It was a case of dangerous
semantics; most likely was a euphemism for “most radioactive.” For future tests,
Air Force officials decided to pursue both manned and unmanned atomic-
sampling wings.

Both kinds of aircraft would be needed for an ultrasecret test that was
pending in the Pacific in 1951. Operation Greenhouse would involve a new kind
of nuclear weapon that was being hailed as the “Super bomb.” It was a
thermonuclear weapon, or hydrogen bomb, the core of which would explode
with the same energy found at the center of the sun. Los Alamos scientists
explained to weapons planners that the destructive power of this new kind of
science, called nuclear fusion, was entirely unknown. Fusion involves exploding
a nuclear bomb inside a nuclear bomb, and privately the scientists expressed fear
that the entire world’s atmosphere could catch on fire during this process.
Scientists became deeply divided over the issue and whether or not to go
forward. The push to create the Super was spearheaded by the indomitable Dr.

Edward Teller and cosigned by weapons planners with the Department of
Defense. The opposition to the Super was spearheaded by Robert Oppenheimer,
the father of the atomic bomb and now Teller’s rival. Oppenheimer, who felt that
developing a weapon capable of ending civilization was immoral, would lose his
security clearance over his opposition to the Super bomb. According to A1
O’Donnell, the EG&G weapons test engineer who wired many of Dr. Teller’s
Super bombs in the Marshall Islands, what happened to Oppenheimer sent a
strong message to everyone involved: “If you want to keep your job, don’t
oppose decisions” on moral grounds. In the end, the weapons planners won, and
the world’s first thermonuclear bomb moved forward as planned.

Drones were needed to take blast and gust measurements inside the
thermonuclear clouds , and to take samples of radioactive debris inside. During
the Greenhouse test series, which did not wind up setting the world on fire, the
first drone in went out of control and crashed into the sea before it ever reached
the stem of the mushroom cloud. Two other drone missions were aborted after
not responding to controls, and a fourth sustained such heavy damage in the
shock wave, it lost control and crash-landed on a deserted island called Bogallua .
where it caught fire and exploded. When the test series was over, the Air Force
ultimately concluded that the unmanned samplers were unreliable. “Following
Operation Greenhouse, the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission
looked more favorably upon manned samplers,” wrote a Defense Nuclear
Agency historian in 1963. “Greenhouse became the last atomic test series during
which drone aircraft were used for this purpose.” So when it came time to
detonate the world’s first full-scale thermonuclear device—an unimaginably
monstrous 10.4 megaton bomb code-named Mike—in the next test series, called
Operation Ivy in the fall of 1952, it was decided that six human pilots, all
volunteers, would fly straight into the center of the radioactive stem and
mushroom cloud. Another group of pilots was assigned to fly along the outer
edges of the predicted fallout zones. That group included Hervev Stockman ,
who, four years later, would become the first CIA pilot to fly over the Soviet
Union in a U-2.

In anticipation of the Mike bomb’s manned sampling mission, the pilots
practiced at the airfield at Indian Springs, thirty miles due south of Area 51.
These pilots, including Stockman, then flew sampling missions through the
kiloton-size atomic bombs being exploded at the Nevada Test Site as part of a
spring 1952 test series called Operation Tumbler-Snapper. “Up to this time,”
Stockman explains, “the scientists had put monkeys in the cockpits of remotely

controlled drone aircraft [at the test site]. They would fly these things through
the [atomic] clouds. Then they began to be interested in the effects of radiation
on humanoids. They realized that with care and cunning they could put people in
there.”

The Air Force worked hard to change the pilots’ perception of themselves as
guinea pigs, at least for the historical record. According to a history of the
atomic cloud sampling program, declassified in 1985, by the time Stockman and
his fellow pilots left Indian Springs for the Marshall Islands to fly missions
through megaton-size thermonuclear bomb clouds, the men accepted that they
“were doing something useful. .. not serving as guinea pigs as they seriously
believed when first called upon to do the sampling.”

Stockman offers another perspective. “ In those days . I didn’t think much
about the moral questions. I was young. The visual picture when these things go
off is absolutely stunning. I was very much in awe of it,” Stockman recalls. “The
[atomic bombs] that were going on in the proving grounds in Nevada were
minute in comparison to these [thermonuclear bomb] monsters out there in the
Pacific. Those were big brutes. When they went off they would punch right
through the Earth’s atmosphere and head out into space.”

After finally arriving in the Pacific, pilots flew “familiarization flights and
rehearsals” in the days leading up to the Mike bomb. But nothing could prepare
an airman for the actual test. Stockman’s colleague Air Force pilot immy P.
Robinson was one of the six pilots who “volunteered” to fly through the Ivy
Mike mushroom cloud. Because the physical bomb was the size of a large
airplane hangar, it couldn’t be called a weapon per se. The bomb was so large
that it was built from the ground up, on an island on the north side of the atoll
called Elugelab. Given the extraordinary magnitude of the thermonuclear bomb,
it is utterly remarkable to consider that shortly after Robinson flew his F-84G
straight through its mushroom stem, he was able to radio back clear thoughts to
his commanding officer, who was located twenty-five miles to the south, on
Eniwetok. “The glow was red, like the inside of a red hot furnace,” the record
states Robinson said. He then described how his radio instrument meters were
spinning around in circles, “like the sweep second hand on a watch.” After going
inside the cloud a second time, Robinson reported that his “airplane stalled out
and gone [sic] into a spin.” His autopilot disengaged and his radio cut out, but
the courageous pilot flew on as instructed. He flew around in circles and finally
he flew back into and out of the mushroom stem and the lower part of its cloud
—for nearly four more hours. Only when it was time for Robinson to refuel did

he realize that the electromagnetic pulse from the thermonuclear bomb had
ruined his control beacon. This meant that it was impossible for him to locate the
fuel tanker.

Robinson radioed the control tower on Eniwetok for help. He was told to
head back to the island immediately. “Approximately ninety-six miles north of
the island, [Robinson] reported that he’d picked up a signal on Eniwetok,”
according to the official record, declassified in 1986 but with Robinson’s name
redacted. At that point, he was down to six hundred pounds of fuel. Bad weather
kicked in; “rain squalls obstructed his views.” Robinson’s fuel gauge registered
empty and then his engine flamed out. “When he was at 10,000 feet, Eniwetok
tower thought he would make the runway, he had the island in sight,” wrote an
Air Force investigator assigned to the case. But he couldn’t glide in because his
aircraft was lined with lead to shield him from radiation. At five thousand feet
and falling fast, Robinson reported he wasn’t going to make it and that he would
have to bail out. Now Robinson faced the ultimate challenge. Atomic-sampling
pilots wore lead-lined vests . How to land safely and get out fast? Fewer than
three and a half miles from the tarmac at Eniwetok, at an altitude of between five
hundred and eight hundred feet, Robinson’s aircraft flipped over and crashed
into the sea. “Approximately one minute later [a] helicopter was over the spot,”
the Air Force investigator wrote. But it was too late. All the helicopter pilot
could find was “an oil slick, one glove, and several maps.” Robinson’s body and
his airplane sank to the bottom of the sea like a stone. His body was never
recovered, and his family would learn of his fate only in 2008, after repeated
Freedom of Information Act requests were finally granted by the Air Force.

Back on Elugelab Island, the dust was settling after the airplane-hangar-size
Mike bomb had exploded with an unfathomable yield of 10.4 megatons—nearly
twice that of its predicted size. Elugelab was not an island anymore. The
thermonuclear bomb had vaporized the entire landmass, sending eighty million
tons of pulverized coral into the upper atmosphere to float around and rain down.
One man observing the bomb with high-density goggles was EG&G weapons
test engineer A1 O’Donnell. He’d wired, armed, and fired the Ivy bomb from the
control room on the USS Estes, which was parked forty miles out at sea.
O’Donnell says that watching the Mike bomb explode was a terrifying
experience. “It was one of the ones that was too big.” says the man who
colleagues called the Triggerman for having wired 186 nuclear bombs. The
nuclear fireball of the Ivy Mike bomb was three miles wide. In contrast, the
bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a fireball that was a tenth of a mile wide. When

the manned airplanes flew over ground zero after the Ivy Mike bomb went off,
they were horrified to see the island was gone. Satellite photographs in 2011
show a black crater filled with lagoon water where the island of Elugelab once
existed.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Drama in the Desert

Before he became president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson liked
to ride through rural Texas in his convertible Lincoln Continental with the top
down. According to his biographer Randall B. Woods, Johnson also liked to
keep a loaded shotgun in the seat next to him, which allowed him to pull over
and shoot deer easily. On the night of October 4, 1957, the then senator was
entertaining a group of fellow hunting enthusiasts at his rural retreat, in the
dining room of his forty-foot-tall, glass-enclosed, air-conditioned hunting blind
that Johnson called his “deer tower.” All around the edge of the lair were
powerful spotlights that could be turned on with the flip of a switch, blinding
unsuspecting deer that had come to graze and making it easier to kill them.

It was an important night for Johnson, one that would set the rest of his life
on a certain path. October 4, 1957, was the night the Russians launched Sputnik,
and the senator began an exuberant anti-Communist crusade. That very night,
once the guests had gone home and the staff of black waiters had cleaned up,
Johnson retired to his bedroom with newfound conviction. “ Til be dammed if I
sleep by the light of a Red Moon,” he told his wife, Lady Bird.

At the time, Lyndon Johnson was not just any senator. He was the
Democratic majority leader, which made him the most powerful legislator in the
United States. Within hours of Sputnik’s launch, Johnson seized on the Red
Moon moment for political gain. The Russians were a threat to America’s
existence, he declared: “ Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like
kids dropping rocks onto cars from Freeway overpasses.”

For many Americans, Johnson’s reaction was easier to comprehend than
President Eisenhower’s seemingly muted response. Before he was president,

Eisenhower had spent his career as a soldier. He was a five-star general. As
former commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II,
Eisenhower had faced many a deadly threat. He had led the invasion at
Normandy and commanded the Allied Forces in the last great German offensive,
the Battle of the Bulge, which meant he and his men shot at a lot more than
blinded deer. In October of 1957, he believed that the 184-pound Russian
satellite called Sputnik was not a cause for panic or alarm.

The nation felt quite different. The public consensus was that Sputnik gave
reason for serious concern. The orb was seen as ominous and foreboding, a
visual portent of more bad things to come from the skies, with 4 percent of
Americans claiming to have seen Sputnik with their own eyes. In reality,
explained historian Matthew Brzezinski, “ What most actually saw was the one-
hundred-foot-long R-7 rocket casing that [Sputnik’s designer Sergei] Korolev
had craftily outfitted with reflective prisms. It trailed some 600 miles behind the
twenty-two-inch satellite,” which in reality could only be seen by a person using
a high-powered optical device. Motivated by the public’s alarm, Senator Lyndon
Johnson provided a foil to Eisenhower’s nonconfrontation, demanding a “full
and exhaustive inquiry” from Congress to learn how the Russians had beaten the
Americans into space. In doing so, Johnson cemented his persona as being tough
on Communists. In turn, this made him an inadvertent advocate for missile
defense and the military-industrial complex. Ultimately, it forced him to be a
proponent for the Vietnam War.

Now, six years and one month after Sputnik, Lyndon Johnson was president.
Seven days after Kennedy was shot dead, Johnson sat in the Oval Office with
CIA director John McCone being briefed on Oxcart and Area 51. Johnson loved
the idea of the Agency’s secret spy plane, but not for the reasons anyone
expected. Johnson seized on one detail in particular: the aircraft’s speed. At the
time, the world was under the impression that the Russians held the record for
airspeed, which was 1,665 miles per hour. When Johnson learned the men at
Area 51 had repeatedly beaten that record, he wanted to make that fact publicly
known. What better way to begin a presidency than by one-upping the Russians?

In reality, outing the most expensive secret spy plane program ever
undertaken in order to win a competition with the Russians did not make the best
national security sense. Surfacing Oxcart would compromise the Agency’s
technological pole position in the overhead espionage field. Oxcart was
singularly capable of flying “any place in the world,” McCone explained. It was
almost “invisible” to Soviet radar, with a “radar cross section in the order of

1/1000 of [a] normal aircraft.” If McCone had had a crystal ball, he could have
told the president that the Oxcart was so far ahead of its time, it would hold
aviation records for sustained height and speed through the end of the century.
Also in the room were Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of
State Dean Rusk, and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, the
administration’s most powerful trio. Conveniently for the Pentagon, all three
men agreed with President Johnson that outing the Oxcart was a terrific idea .

The reason for the trio’s desire for transparency was that the Air Force had
clear designs on cutting the CIA loose from the business of spy planes once and
for all. Outing a program made the need for cover obsolete. Before Kennedy’s
assassination, the Air Force high command had been writing secret proposals
arguing for ways in which they could take over Oxcart . Four months earlier, Air
Force commander General Schriever wrote a memo to Eugene Zuckert, secretary
of the Air Force, suggesting that “an incident during the flight test program
could force a disclosure.” The CIA had gotten lucky with Ken Collins’s Oxcart
crash, General Schriever said, but if another one of the Agency’s secret spy
planes were to crash “it would be extremely difficult to avoid some public
release.” The subtext being that maybe there was a way that the Air Force could
help facilitate this public disclosure. There was a final option, one that involved
getting “the President on board.” A few weeks before Kennedy’s death, the Air
Force had gone to him with a proposal to make Oxcart public; Kennedy had said
to sit tight. Now it appeared that President Johnson was going to be much easier
to manipulate.

To counter Air Force demands McCone tried a different approach , one that
involved money. He told the president that more than half of Oxcart’s budget had
already been spent producing fifteen airplanes. To expose Oxcart now was a
terrible idea, McCone said, not just in terms of national security but because it
would be a colossal waste of money. Johnson agreed. But the president still
wanted to one-up the Russians, so he settled on a slightly different plan. Through
a veil of half-truths, he would out the Air Force’s attack version of the Oxcart,
the YF-12, as the speed-breaker. The YF-12 would be given a false cover, the
fictitious name A-ll . Respecting McCone’s national security concerns, the
actual A-12 Oxcart program—its true speed, operational ceiling, and near
invisibility to radar—would remain classified top secret until the CIA
declassified the Oxcart program, in 2007.

Three months later, on February 29, 1964, Johnson held a press conference in
the International Treaty Room at the State Department. “ The world record for

aircraft speed , currently held by the Soviets, has been repeatedly broken in
secrecy by the... A-ll,” President Johnson declared from the podium, thrilled to
give the Russians a poke in the ribs. At Area 51, caught off guard by the
requirement to do a presidential dog-and-pony show, the 1129th Special
Activities Squadron scrambled to get an airplane to Edwards Air Force Base in
California for a press junket, which was called for immediately after the
president’s grand announcement. Two YF-12s belonging to the Air Force but
being tested at Area 51 were quickly flown in from Groom Fake and driven into
a special hangar at Edwards. The airplanes’ titanium surfaces were so hot they
set off the hangar’s sprinkler system, which mistook the high-temperature metal
for a fire. When the press junket began, the aircraft were still dripping wet .
Never mind; no one noticed. Fike the president, the reporters were enamored by
the notion of Mach 3 speed. Of much more significance was what the event
meant to the CIA. The rivalry between the Agency and the Air Force for control
over Oxcart was hotter than ever.

With the two departments’ gloves off, the fate of Oxcart now hung precariously
in the balance. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara snidely told CIA director
John McCone that he doubted the Oxcart would ever be used. If it was used,
McNamara said, it would “probably have to be done without the specific
knowledge of the President .” alluding to the Gary Powers shoot-down. Never
again could a president be linked to a CIA aerial espionage mission. John
McCone shot back that he had “every intention of using Oxcart and had so
advised the President.” McNamara may have won the battle by getting President
Johnson to surface part of the Oxcart program, but McCone was letting him
know on behalf of the Agency that the Pentagon hadn’t yet won the war.

A second Air Force-Agency debate that involved the fate of the Oxcart,
which in turn involved the fate of Area 51, centered on improvements in satellite
and drone technology. McNamara told McCone that these two platforms would
eventually eliminate the need for the Agency’s expensive, cumbersome Oxcart
program. And yet both men knew that for the time being, Oxcart could deliver
what satellites could not, and on two separate but equally important counts. In
the six years since Sputnik, satellites had advanced to the degree that their spy
images were good, though not great. But satellites had an inherent limitation in
the world of espionage: they worked on fixed schedules. This would forever
negate any element of surprise. The average satellite took ninety minutes to

circle the world, and overflight schedules were easily determined by analysts at
NORAD. The ironically named Oxcart was an attack espionage vehicle: quick
and versatile, nimble and shrewd, with overpasses that would be totally
unpredictable to any enemy. But most of all, in terms of clear photographic
intelligence, nothing could compete with what Oxcart was about to be able to
deliver to the president: two-and-a-half-foot blocks of detail made clear by film
frames shot from seventeen miles up.

While McNamara and McCone fought, a presidential election loomed for
Johnson. Nikita Khrushchev, ever the antagonist, decided to make things
difficult for the saber-rattling Texan. During the campaign summer of 1964, the
increasingly bellicose Khrushchev declared that any U-2s flying over Cuba
would be shot down. The CIA saw the threat by the Soviet dictator as an
opportunity to let Oxcart show its stuff, and McCone pushed President Johnson
for an official mission. Finally, the president approved the Oxcart for Operation
Skylark , a plan to fly missions over Cuba if Khrushchev showed signs of putting
missiles in Cuba again. Skylark provided a terrific opportunity for the CIA to
flex its overhead muscle and gain an edge on the Air Force. The only problem
was that out at Area 51, the Oxcart wasn’t quite ready.

Kenneth Collins sat in the cockpit of the world’s fastest aircraft as it climbed
through sixty thousand feet. On this particular flight, navigators had him flying
north to the border of Canada, where he was to turn around and head back.
Flight-testing the Oxcart was the best job in the world, according to Ken Collins .
Most jobs came with a daily routine, and for Collins each day of work at Area 51
meant another performance field to tackle—anything but routine.

For months, the pilots had been testing the hydraulics, navigation system, and
flight controls on the aircraft. After each flight, the data from flight recorders
was analyzed by a team of Lockheed engineers. Changes were made daily at
Groom Lake. The wiring continued to be problematic until replacement
materials that could withstand 800 degrees were finally located. Another
problem that took forever to solve involved the buildup of the liquid chemical
triethylborane (TEB) that had been preventing the engine afterburners from
starting. Finally, that too was solved. But one dangerous problem remained, and
that was the dreaded un-starts.

Moving through seventy-five thousand feet now, Collins watched the gauges
in front of him. It was -70 degrees Fahrenheit outside with exhaust gas coming

out of both engines at 3,400 degrees Fahrenheit. Each one of a pair of specially
designed J-58 turbojet engines behind him generated as much power as all four
of the turbines on the 81,000-ton ocean liner the Queen Mary. It was those
insanely powerful engines that enabled the aircraft to fly so high and so fast. But
the Queen Mary carried more than three thousand people; the Oxcart just one.
Collins counted on those engines. If anything went wrong with either of them it
could mean catastrophe. Carefully, he moved the aircraft through the dangerous
window between Mach 2.5 and Mach 2.8, which translates to something around
2,000 mph—as fast as a rifle bullet goes. Getting up to and through that speed
asked more of the aircraft than anything else. It was also the place where an un¬
start was most likely to occur, and why Collins was counting on the aircraft
engines to perform.

To the pilots, there was nothing scarier than an engine un-start. To the
engineers, there was nothing to explain the cause of it. Flying at a certain pitch,
one of the two J-58 engines could inexplicably experience an airflow cutoff and
go dead. At that speed, the inlets were swallowing ten thousand cubic feet of air
each second. One engineer likened this to the equivalent of two million people
inhaling at once; an un-start was like all those people suddenly cut short of air.
During the ten seconds it took to correct the airflow problem—one engine dead,
the other generating enough power to propel an ocean liner—a violent yawing
would occur as the aircraft twisted on a vertical axis. This caused a pilot to get
slammed across the cockpit while desperately trying to restart the dead engine.
The fear was that the pilot could get knocked unconscious, which would mean
the end of the pilot, and the end of the airplane.

As Collins moved through Mach 2.7, the Earth below him hurtled by at an
astonishing rate of more than half a mile each second. The aircraft’s preset flight
path kept it away from urban centers, bridges, and dams for safety reasons, and
from Indian burial grounds for political reasons. Once, a pilot flying over
semirural West Virginia had to restart an engine at thirty thousand feet. The
resulting sonic boom shattered a chimney inside a factory on the ground, and
two men working there were crushed to death . And if a pilot had to bail out, as
Collins had in 1963, the aircraft needed significant amounts of remote land on
which to crash. At 123,000 pounds, this airplane had about as much glide in it as
a tire iron falling from the sky.

Collins pushed the aircraft through Mach 2.8. In another forty-five seconds
he would be out of the danger zone. Nearing eighty-five thousand feet, the
inevitable tiny black dots began to appear on the aircraft windshield, sporadic at

first, like the first drops of summer rain. Only a few months earlier, scientists at
Area 51 had been baffled by those black dots. They worried it was some kind of
high-atmosphere corrosion until the mystery was solved in the lab. It turned out
the black spots were dead bugs that were cycling around in the upper
atmosphere, blasted into the jet stream by the world’s two superpowers’ rally of
thermonuclear bombs. The bugs were killed in the bombs’ blasts and sent aloft to
ninety thousand feet in the ensuing mushroom clouds where they gained orbit.

Collins was just seconds away from Mach 3, which meant cruising altitude at
last. If there was a brief moment where he might allow himself to relax, maybe
even glance outside at the round Earth below and enjoy the cruise, that moment
would come soon. But then the un-start happened. In a critical instant, the
airplane banged and yawed so dramatically it was as if the airplane’s tail were
trying to catch its nose. Collins’s body was flung forward in his harness. His
plastic flight helmet crashed against the cockpit glass, denting the helmet and
nearly knocking him unconscious . As the airplane slid across the atmosphere,
Collins steeled himself and restarted the engine. The aircraft’s second engine
kicked back into motion almost as quickly as it had stopped.

Things in the cockpit returned to normal. Inside his pressure suit, Collins felt
his heart beating like a jackhammer in his chest. Fate really is a hunter, he
thought. It lurks behind you in constant pursuit. When it will catch up to you and
take you is anybody’s guess.

Death didn’t get him this time, and for that he was grateful. But somebody
needed to fix this un-start problem, fast. With his feet firmly planted on the earth
again, Collins discussed the issue of the un-starts with Bill Park during his
debrief. Park was Lockheed’s chief flight-test pilot and he always sat patiently
with the project pilots after their flights, listening intently about what went on
during the flight and what needed work. No detail was too small. Park agreed
with Collins; the un-start problem was major and had to be fixed before
somebody died. Park was the liaison between the project pilots and Kelly
Johnson, and Park was directed to Lockheed’s thermodynamicist Ben Rich to get
the un-start problem solved. Park had experienced his own share of un-starts,
and giving Ben Rich an ultimatum was not something he had any problem with.

Rich’s office was sparely decorated with a few trophies and some plaques on
the walls. There were papers everywhere, and pencils with the erasers gone. A
hand-cranked calculator and a metal slide rule sat on Rich’s desk. Park set his
flight helmet down—it had its own crack, similar to Collins’s—and pointed to it.
“Fix it.” Park said . “And I mean the un-start problem, not my helmet. Time to

suit up, Ben. Time for you to see how it feels.” The pilots figured that the only
way to get Ben Rich to understand just how unacceptable this un-start business
was would be to have Rich experience the nightmare scenario himself, and there
just happened to be a two-seater version of the Oxcart on base. The Air Force
was currently testing its drone-carrying version of the Oxcart, the M-21/D-21, in
the skies over Groom Lake, and the pilots had seen the two-seater going in and
out of the hangar all week. Park told Ben Rich the time had come for him to take
a Mach 3 ride.

In a burst of what he would later describe as “a crazy moment of weakness,”
Ben Rich agreed. Rich was a self-described Jewish nerd. Totally unathletic, he
was a kid who never made the high school baseball team. Before joining Skunk
Works, Ben Rich had only one claim to fame: being awarded a patent for
designing a nickel-chromium heating system that prevented a pilot’s penis from
freezing to his urine elimination pipe. He was a design wizard, not an airplane
cowboy. He’d never come close to flying supersonic before, and he had
absolutely no desire to go that fast. But he was chief engineer for Skunk Works,
so fixing the un-start problem was his job. “I’ll do it,” Ben Rich said.

Before Ben Rich could get into the world’s fastest aircraft, he had to go
through a battery of physical tests. You can’t just climb into an aircraft that gets
up to ninety thousand feet without being checked out in a pressure suit in an
altitude chamber first. The flight surgeons on base prepped Rich for tests, the
way they usually did pilots. Rich passed the physical and a few early stress tests
but when he got to the pressure-chamber test—the one that simulated ejection at
fifty thousand feet—things did not go as the engineer had planned. The moment
the chamber door closed behind Ben Rich, he panicked. “I was sucking oxygen
like a marathon runner and screaming, ' Get me out of here!”’ Rich later recalled .
Without ever getting close to simulating what it was like to fly at Mach 3, let
alone experiencing an un-start at that speed, Ben Rich admitted in his memoir
that he had still nearly dropped dead from fright.

But the point was made. Rich dedicated all his efforts to fixing the un-start
problem. Like so many engineering challenges facing the scientists at Area 51,
fixing it involved great ingenuity. In this case, Rich and his team didn’t exactly
fix the problem. Instead, they created a go-around that made things not so life-
threatening for the pilots. Rich invented an electronic control that made sure that
when one engine experienced an un-start, the second engine dropped its power
as well. The control switch would then restart both engines at the same time.
After the new fix, pilots were notified of the un-start by a loud buzzing noise in

the cockpit. And as far as nearly getting knocked unconscious at 2,000 miles per
hour, Oxcart pilots could cross that off their lists of concerns.

In addition to the problems the pilots were having getting the airplane up to
speed, there were problems with the electronic countermeasures, or ECMs. The
reports being analyzed back at Langley said if Operation Skylark was to happen
over Cuba, cruise speed would have to be at a minimum Mach 2.8, because there
was a real chance that the Soviet radar systems in Cuba would be able to detect
Oxcart flights and possibly even shoot them down. While Project Palladium
officers continue to work on jamming methods, the Office of Special Activities
at the Pentagon decided that the solution lay in working to enhance stealth. The
phenomenally low radar cross section on the Oxcart had to be lowered even
further. This meant that Lockheed physicist Edward Lovick and the radar cross-
section team were summoned back to Area 51.

In a hangar not far from the radar range, Edward Lovick got to work on a
one-eighth-scale model of the Oxcart. In what became known as Project
Kempster-Lacroix . Lovick designed a system straight out of Star Trek or James
Bond. “Two giant electron guns were to be mounted on either side of the
aircraft,” Lovick recalls. Remarkably, the purpose of the guns would be “to shoot
out a twenty-five-foot-wide ion cloud of highly charged particles in front of the
plane as it flew over denied territory.” That gaseous cloud, Lovick determined,
would further absorb radar waves coming up from radar tracking stations on the
ground.

Using the small-scale model, the scientists were able to prove the scheme
worked, which meant it was time to build a full-scale mock-up of Kempster-
Lacroix. Testing the system out on a full-size aircraft, the scientists discovered
that the radiation emitted by the electron guns would be too dangerous for the
pilots. So a separate team of engineers designed an X-ray shield that the pilots
could wear over their pressure suits while flying an Oxcart outfitted with
Kempster-Lacroix. When one of the pilots made a test run, he determined that
the thickness of the shield was far too cumbersome to wear while trying to fly an
airplane at Mach 3. Then, while Lovick was working on a solution, the Air Lorce
changed its mind. The Oxcart’s low observables were low enough, the Pentagon
said. Project Kempster-Lacroix was abandoned.

It was ironic, to say the least. Not the flip-flopping by the Air Lorce but the
concerns about radiation. By 1964, the government had exploded 286 nuclear
bombs within shouting distance of Area 51. One year earlier, the United States
and the Soviet Union had signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty prohibiting nuclear

testing in the air, space, or sea. The initiative had been in the works for years but
negotiations had repeatedly failed. Now that it was finally signed, testing had
moved underground. Neither superpower trusted the other to honor the
commitment for very long, and the number of tests per month actually
accelerated after the treaty; the idea was to stay weapons-ready in the event one
side broke the treaty. Between September 1961 and December 1964, a record-
breaking 162 bombs were exploded at the Nevada Test Site inside underground
tunnels and shafts. Nearly half of these explosions resulted in the “accidental
release of radioactivity” into the atmosphere.

In addition to weapons tests, the nuclear laboratories were racing to find
ways to use nuclear bombs for “peaceful applications.” This included ideas like
widening the Panama Canal or blowing up America’s natural geography to make
room for future highways and homes. These proposed earthmoving projects fell
under the rubric of Project Plowshares, a name chosen from a verse in the Old
Testament, Micah 4:3:

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into
pmning hooks: nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall
they learn war anymore.

But that was just semantics. Test ban treaty or not, the Department of Defense
had no intention of putting down its swords. The men were fully committed to
the long haul that was the Cold War.

Finally satisfied with the radar cross section, the CIA decided to set up its own
electronic countermeasures office at Area 51. In 1963, the first group consisted
of two men from Sylvania, a company better known for making lightbulbs than
for its top secret work for the CIA. “ The first jamming system was called Red
Dog : later it became Blue Dog,” explains Ken Swanson, the first official ECM
officer at Area 51. The Red Dog system was designed to detect Russian surface-
to-air missiles coming after Oxcart and then jam those missiles with an
electronic pulse. The work was exciting when the airplanes were flying and there
was actual data to collect, but if the Red Dog system failed and needed fixing, it
meant a lot of waiting around.

These were the early days of electronic warfare, and there were not a lot of
Red Dog spare parts lying around. As a result, Ken Swanson worked many long

weekends at Area 51. Swanson says that sometimes he and his Sylvania
colleague felt like they were the only ones on the base. One weekend the men
took the Area 51 motor pool’s four-wheel-drive vehicle up to Bald Mountain, the
tallest peak on the Groom Range, to have a look around. “We found a bunch of
old Model Ts and had no idea what they were doing there,” Swanson recalls.
Another time he went solo to investigate the old mines. “I was wearing tennis
shoes and Bermuda shorts and I bumped into a bunch of rattlers sunning
themselves. Next time I went back, I wore snake boots,” he says. During winter
weekends, there were even fewer people at Area 51, and for entertainment, after
a long day performing high-tech electronic-countermeasures work, Swanson
would go joyriding around the dry lake bed. He’d borrow an Econoline van from
the motor pool, take it out on the frozen tarmac, and do spins. “But I stopped
after I had the van on two wheels once,” Swanson says.

With Red Dog, the CIA wanted to see how the Oxcart would show up on
Soviet radar, and so, at the southern tip of Groom Lake, on EG&G Road,
Sylvania built two ECM systems, one to simulate Russian SA-2 radar and a
second to simulate the Fan Song surface-to-air missile system that was showing
up in North Vietnam. The goal was to see what Oxcart looked like, or hopefully
did not look like, on these radars. An equally important part of the radar testing
system was the radar pole that had to be installed on the top of Bald Mountain.
For that, the CIA recruited one of the best rescue helicopter pilots in the country,
Charlie Trapp.

“I was minding my own business in South Carolina,” Trapp recalls, “when
these guys from the Air Force called me up and asked if I want to come fly a
two-airplane helo unit in Nevada, one hundred miles from the nearest town.

They said it was important and that I’d have to be able to hover and land at nine
thousand feet.” Trapp thought it sounded interesting as well as challenging and
he signed on. “We flew in from Nellis in the H-43 [helicopter] and before we
even landed at Area 51, they said, ‘Let’s go see how you land on top of the
mountain first,’ that’s how important the mountain project was to the beginning
of my Area 51 assignment.” For months, Trapp hauled cement in thousand-
pound buckets from the Area 51 operations center up to the top of Bald
Mountain. “I’d hover over the top and lower the equipment down,” Trapp
explains. “There were high winds and serious dust storms.” Finally, Trapp
helicoptered in the one-hundred-foot-long radar pole, which a team of workers
cemented into place. Mission accomplished. “We did such a good job, the CIA
gave us air medals,” Trapp says. On his way back down to Area 51 in the

helicopter, Trapp would fly around the different mountain peaks. “Once, I came
across an old graveyard. In a helicopter you can hover and look. The graves were
made of piles of rocks. I remember two of them were really small. They must
have been kids’ graves.” The mountain had a psychological pull with many of
the men at Area 51 during the Oxcart years. It was also the only place the men
were allowed to go that was technically “off base.”

Down on the tarmac, every time an A-12 Oxcart took off, it was Trapp’s job
to hang out airborne, two hundred feet above the runway and off to one side, “in
case the aircraft crashed,” Trapp explains. “My helicopter contained firefighting
equipment, and I always had two PJs with me, para-rescue jumpers, [who
perform] like a Navy SEAL. It was a lot of work having us airborne and I told
the boss, Colonel Holbury, that I could be airborne in less than two minutes’
time. So the policy changed.” Instead, Trapp was on standby in the event of an
accident, “which meant I got to drive the only golf cart around the Area 51
base.” The golf cart came in handy at night. “We played a lot of poker in the
House-Six bar,” Trapp explains. “The loser had to do the late-night cheeseburger
mn over to the mess hall. With the golf cart, you could get there and back in five
minutes.”

For all the technology that was around at Area 51, entertainment was
decidedly old-school. “We did a lot of arm wrestling,” Trapp says. “Some guys
played racquetball and other guys played three-hole golf.” When Trapp gained
ten pounds eating so many late-night cheeseburgers, he was ordered to lose the
weight or risk losing his job. To assist in the effort, Colonel Holbury challenged
Trapp to weekly rounds of squash. Once, someone brought a sailboard out to
Area 51, and the pilots pulled rank and got the men in the machine shop to affix
wheels to the bottom of the board. “We took the thing out to Groom Lake when
the wind was blowing really hard,” Trapp recalls. “It didn’t go that fast but we
didn’t care.”

Of all the pastimes, the unanimous favorite was flying model airplanes using
remote control. “We had two areas for flying model planes,” Trapp recalls. “Out
on the grass by the golf course, and on the tarmac out on the dry lake.

Sometimes the airplanes would go so far and so high they’d get lost. A guy
would come up to me and say, 'Hey, Charlie, when you’re out in the helicopter,
can you keep your eye out for my model plane? It’s got a five-foot wing span
and yellow wings.’ We found ways to entertain ourselves at Area 51. We had to;
there weren’t any girls.”

The man who took the model airplane flying most seriously was Frank

Murray. He was also the chase pilot with the most flying time during Project
Oxcart. “You could always find Frank sitting in his room gluing model airplanes
together,” Colonel Slater recalls. “That was his idea of fun. Or maybe he was the
only guy at 51 who wasn’t half-drunk at eleven o’clock at night.” Which is how
Murray accumulated the most flying time. “If somebody’s kid got hurt in the
middle of the night, which happened more than you think, and I need a pilot to
get someone off base fast, I’d round up Frank,” Colonel Slater explains. When
master fuels sergeant Harry Martin’s grandfather died, it was Frank Murray who
flew him back east so he could get to the funeral in time. “Frank was always
willing to do the job,” Colonel Slater explains. “Most people require time off
from flying. Not Frank.”

Murray flew model airplanes to keep his head clear for flying real airplanes.
“Everyone had their different thing,” Colonel Slater says. “Bud Wheelon from
CIA used to want to play tennis at midnight when he was on base. Some liked to
go hunting up in the mountains by the old Sheehan mine. Holbury used to like to
make the guard dogs run. Some guys threw rocks at rattlesnakes. I liked to drive
around in the jeep and find petrified wood.”

As an Oxcart chase pilot, Murray spent his days and nights chasing the Mach
3 airplane in the F-101. The Voodoo was a two-seat, supersonic jet fighter the
Air Force used to accompany the Oxcart on takeoffs and landings. “We flew it
with Oxcart up through the special operating area, or Yuletide, which was the
airspace just north of the base,” Murray explains. “The Agency had us fly
alongside the Oxcart in the Voodoo until we couldn’t keep up with the Oxcart
anymore.” Flying chase meant Murray got assigned most of the grunt work and
enjoyed little of the glamour. “I was a little jealous of the Oxcart pilots,” he
admits. “How can a pilot not be? But I was happy as a pig in the Voodoo. For a
farm boy from San Diego, flying chase for the 1129th was a good time.”

Murray flew the F-101 doing just about everything that needed to be done in
support of Oxcart operations. This included flying against the Red Dog
simulators, observing tanker refuels, overseeing takeoffs and landings, and
flying Lockheed photographers around on CIA photo shoots. But Murray’s path
in life took a significant redirection when General Ledford, the head of the
Office of Special Activities at the Pentagon, decided he wanted to learn how to
fly the F-101 while he was overseeing activities at Area 51. Murray recalls: “The
general had been a bomber pilot in World War Two but he hadn’t ever flown
anything as fast as the Voodoo could go, which was around twelve hundred or
thirteen hundred miles per hour. So he decided that he wanted to learn how to fly

it and when it came to choosing an IP, an instructor pilot, the general chose me.”

Murray now had to teach a legendary war hero, someone who also happened
to be the highest-ranking military officer on the Oxcart program, how to fly
supersonic. It might have been a daunting task. Except that it was not in Frank
Murray’s character to be apprehensive. To Murray, it sounded like fun. “Out at
the Ranch we had eight 101s that ran chase and one of them was a two-holer,
with two cockpits and two sticks. ‘Come on, Frankie,’ the general said. He got in
the back and up we went.”

General Fedford began to spend more and more time at the Ranch, where, in
addition to the serious work being done, operations had taken on a boys’ club
atmosphere. After a day of intense flying, nights were spent eating, socializing,
and having drinks. “Sometimes, on the late side of things after dinner, Fedford
would get a hair in his hat that he wanted to get back to Washington to see his
wife, Polly,” Murray says. “He’d slap me on the back. That was my cue to take
him home.” Home, in Washington, DC, was 2,500 miles away, and with
supersonic aircraft at one’s disposal, this could actually happen this late at night.
“Fedford was my student but he was also the general so on these trips home, I
started letting him sit in the front of the plane; I’d sit in back. Well, all those
hours flying back and forth from Area 51 to Washington, that cemented it. He
was my boss but he also became my friend.” Fedford had other friends as well,
several in high places at the Air Force, which made getting back to the East
Coast from Nevada in the middle of the night a relatively easier trip. “Fedford
had a buddy who was still in SAC, an air division commander at Blytheville Air
Force Base in northeast Arkansas, just about halfway between 51 and
Washington. Fedford would radio him when we were up in the air approaching
the next state over and he’d say, ‘Have you got a tanker in the area?’ If he did or
didn’t you could bet your fifty there’d be a tanker lining up next to you
somewhere over Arkansas,” Murray says. What this meant was that when
Murray and the general were traveling from Area 51 to the East Coast late at
night, they never even had to stop for gas.

After a little more than two hours in the air, the men would land at Andrews
Air Force Base and taxi up to the generals’ quarters—similar to a luxury hotel
suite on the base—and enjoy a postflight scotch. “Fedford had a fancy setup on
base quarters that had a fully equipped bar,” Murray explains. “We’d have a pop
and chat a little before his wife, Polly, arrived to pick him up and take him home.
I’d spend the night in the generals’ quarters. Get some sleep and in the morning
head home to 51.”

It was an exciting time for Frank Murray. He couldn’t have imagined living
this life. Only a few years earlier, he’d been flying Voodoos at Otis Air Force
Base as part of the Air Defense Command when he had seen an interesting sign
tacked on a bulletin board that read NASA is looking for F-101 chase pilots. He
thought working for NASA sounded like fun. He had no idea that was just a
cover story and that the Air Force, not NASA, was really looking for chase pilots
for the Oxcart program at Area 51. Murray applied and got in. He moved the
family to Nevada and swore an oath not to tell anyone what he did, not even
Stella, his wife. But he knew his family would be super proud of him. For a farm
boy from San Diego, he was at the top of his game.

While Project Oxcart worked to get mission-ready, back in Washington the
widening of the conflict in Vietnam by the Communists in the north was
becoming a nightmare for President Johnson. He had won the favor of the people
back in 1957 by declaring Communism to be the world’s greatest threat. In
comparison to the thermonuclear-armed Soviet Union, Vietnam was to Johnson a
sideshow. But it was also a piece in the widely held domino theory: if Vietnam
fell to Communism, the whole region would ultimately fall. President Johnson
had inherited Vietnam from President Kennedy when it was a political crisis and
not yet a war. That changed in the second summer Johnson held office, in
August of 1964, with the Gulf of Tonkin. The Pentagon declared that the U.S.
Navy had suffered an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam against the USS
Maddox, and the National Security Agency had evidence, McNamara said. This
event allowed Johnson to push the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through Congress,
which authorized war. ( In 2005 NSA released a detailed confession admitting
that its intelligence had been “deliberately skewed to support the notion that
there had been an attack.”) To avenge the USS Maddox attack, Johnson ordered
air attacks against the North Vietnamese, sending Navy pilots on bombing
missions over North Vietnam. When a number of U.S. pilots were shot down,
the North Vietnamese took them as prisoners of war.

The war’s escalation led Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to perform
an about-face regarding Oxcart . The Agency’s spy plane could be vitally useful
after all, McNamara now said, certainly when it came to gathering intelligence in
North Vietnam. The Agency knew the Russians had begun supplying surface-to-
air missile systems to the Communists in North Vietnam, and now they were
shooting down American boys. Both the Air Force and the Agency sent U-2s on

reconnaissance missions, and these overflights revealed that missile sites were
being set up around Hanoi . But the Pentagon needed far more specific target
information. In June, McNamara sat down with the CIA and began drawing up
plans to get the Oxcart ready for its first mission at last.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Ultimate Boys’Club

At Groom Lake throughout the 1960s, at least once a month and always before
dawn, base personnel would be shaken from their beds by a violent explosion.
When the rumbling first started happening, Ken Collins would leap from bed as
a sensation that felt like a massive earthquake rolled by. A nuclear bomb was
being exploded next door, underground, just a few miles west of Oxcart pilots’
quarters. Next, the blast wave would hit Collins’s Quonset hut and then roll on,
heading across the Emigrant Mountain Range with a surreal and unnatural force
that made the coyotes wail.

In the years that Collins had been test-flying the Oxcart at Area 51, the
Department of Defense had been testing nuclear bombs with bravado. After a
while, being awoken before dawn meant little to Collins, and he’d roll over and
go back to sleep. But on this one particular morning something felt different. It
was a banging he was hearing, not a boom. Collins opened his eyes. Someone
was indeed banging on his Quonset hut door. Next came a loud voice that
sounded a lot like Colonel Slater’s. Collins leaped out of bed and opened his
door. Colonel Slater had an unusual look of concern, and without explanation, he
ordered Collins to get into his flight suit as fast as he could. This was a highly
unusual request, Collins thought. It was definitely before dawn. Behind where
Slater stood on the Quonset hut stoop, Collins could see it was still dark outside.
For a brief moment, he feared the worst. Had America gone to war with the
Soviets? What could possibly force an unplanned Oxcart mission flight?

Rushing to put on his clothes, Collins heard Colonel Slater waking up the flight
surgeon who lived in the apartment quarters next door.

Collins followed Slater in a run toward the hangar where the Oxcart lived.

There he was quickly briefed on the situation: the Pentagon had called to say that
a Russian reconnaissance balloon was flying across the United States, floating
with the prevailing winds in a westerly direction. Collins was to find the Soviet
balloon—fast. Normally, the flight surgeon would have spent two hours just
getting Collins into his pressure suit. That morning Collins was suited up and
sitting in the cockpit of the Oxcart in a little over thirty minutes. Up he went,
blasting off the tarmac, north then east, on direct orders by the Pentagon to “hunt
and find” the Soviet weather balloon visually and using radar.

Up in the air it dawned on Collins what a wild-goose chase he was on. What
would a Russian reconnaissance balloon look like? What were the chances of
making visual contact with such a thing? At speeds of more than 2,200 mph, he
was traveling more than half a mile each second. Even if he saw the balloon, in
just a fraction of a second it would be behind him. Even worse, what if he
actually did get that close to the flying object? If the Oxcart hit anything while
moving at Mach 3, the plane would break apart instantly and he’d be toast.

Flying somewhere over the middle of the continent, Collins briefly identified
an object on radar about 350 miles away. As instructed, he flew around the
object in the tightest circle he could perform at Mach 3, which meant his circle
had a radius of about 400 miles. He never saw the balloon with his own eyes.

After Collins returned to base, engineers scrambled to read the information
on the data recorder. The incident has never been declassified . Admitting that the
Soviets invaded U.S. airspace—whether in a craft or by balloon—is not
something any U.S. official has ever done. Collins never asked any follow-up
questions. That’s how it was to be a pilot: the less you knew, the better . He knew
too many fellow pilots from Korea who had come home from POW camps
missing fingernails—if they came home at all. Now, ten years later, pilots shot
down over North Vietnam were experiencing the same kinds of torture, maybe
worse. The less you knew, the better. That was the pilots’ creed.

As deputy director of the CIA, Richard Helms was a huge fan of Oxcart. He
worked closely on the program with Bud Wheelon, whose efforts earned him the
title of first director of science and technology for the CIA. Now that Richard
Bissell was gone, there were few men in the Agency as devoted to the Area 51
spy plane program as Wheelon and Helms. Whereas Wheelon saw his position at
the CIA as a temporary one—he signed on for a four-year contract, fulfilled it,
and left the CIA—Helms was a career Agency man. He’d worked closely with

Bissell on the U-2 from its inception and he knew what important intelligence
could come from overhead photographs. The United States learned more about
the Soviets’ weapons capabilities from its first U-2 overflight than it had in the
previous ten years from its spies on the ground. Off McNamara’s inquiry about
possibly using the Oxcart on spy missions over North Vietnam, Helms made a
personal trip out to Area 51 to sign off on Oxcart design specifications himself.
Helms was also acutely aware of the Air Force’s plans to push Oxcart out of the
way in favor of their own reconnaissance spy plane, the SR-71 Blackbird. If
Helms could get a mission for Oxcart, the chances of the CIA maintaining its
supersonic espionage program greatly increased.

Almost everyone who visited Area 51 became enamored with the desert
facility, and Helms was no exception. It was impossible not to be fascinated by
the power and prestige the secret facility embodied. It was the quintessential
boys’ club, both exotic and elite. Most of all, it gave visitors the sense of being a
million miles away from the hustle and bustle of Washington, DC. There were
no cars to drive—instead, Agency shuttles moved men around the base. No
radio, almost no TV . As a visitor to Area 51, Helms was particularly careful not
to step on any powerful Air Force toes. The base was, operations-wise, Air Force
turf now. The CIA was in charge of missions, but there were no missions, which
only underscored a growing sense of Agency impotence. The Air Force
controlled most of the day-to-day operations on the base, including proficiency
flights and air-to-air refuelings, which were practiced regularly so everyone in
the 1129th Special Activities Squadron stayed in shape.

During his visit, Helms kept a relatively low profile, making sure to spend
more of his time in the field—on the airstrip with the pilots and in the aircraft
hangars with the engineers—than drinking White Horse Scotch with Air Force
brass in the House-Six bar. During test flights, Helms liked to roll up his sleeves
and stand on the tarmac when the Oxcart took off. He likened the experience to
standing on the epicenter of an 8.0 earthquake and described the great orange
fireballs that spewed out of the Oxcart’s engines as “hammers from hell.” Helms,
an upper-middle-class intellectual from Philadelphia, loved colorful language.
He’d once told a room of military men that the Vietnam War was “like an
incubus.” a nightmarish male demon that creeps up on sleeping women and has
intercourse with them. Helms’s grandiose language, most likely intentional,
separated him from straight-talking military men.

Despite playing a key role in planning and executing covert operations in
Vietnam, Richard Helms did not believe the United States could win the war

there. This posture kept him out of step with Pentagon brass. Helms believed
Vietnam was fracturing consensus about America’s need to win the Cold War,
which he saw as the more important battle at hand. He was an advocate of using
technology to beat the Russians by way of overhead reconnaissance from
satellites and spy planes, which was why he liked Oxcart so much. And unlike
Pentagon and State Department officials, who, for the most part, cautioned the
president against ever sending spy planes over the Soviet Union again, Helms,
like McCone, felt the president should do just that. “The only sin in espionage is
getting caught.” Helms once said. He believed the best intelligence was
“objective intelligence.” Photographs didn’t have an opinion and couldn’t lie.
Helms attributed his respect for objectivity to his working as a journalist for the
wire service United Press International. In 1936, a then twenty-four-year-old
Richard Helms got his first big scoop: covering the Berlin Olympics as a
reporter, he was invited to interview Adolf Hitler. Six years later, Helms would
be recruited by the Office of Strategic Services , the precursor organization to the
CIA, to spy on Hitler’s men.

With Richard Helms at Area 51 in December of 1965, the Oxcart was finally
declared operational. Celebrations were in order. One of the pilots offered to fly
a C-130 Hercules on a seafood run to Westover Air Force Base in
Massachusetts, where Werner Weiss had coolers full of lobsters, oysters, and
crab legs ready to be taken to Area 51. Big-budget black operations had
stomach-size perks too. After such feasts, the kitchen staff buried the shells in
compost piles along the base perimeter, and the joke among Air Force support
staff was that future archaeologists digging in the area would think Groom Lake
had been an ocean as late as the 1960s.

As secret and compartmentalized as the base was, the mess hall was the one
place where the men gathered together to break bread. Technical assistants
would rub elbows with three- and four-star generals visiting there. Ernie
Williams, who had helped find Area 51’s first well in 1955 and now helped
coordinate meals, loved it when Werner Weiss invited him into the mess hall to
eat steaks with generals who wore stars on their chests. And after the meal was
over, the men would again go their separate ways. The Special Projects program
managers and the engineering nerds usually retired to their quarters to play poker
and drink bottled beer. The scientists were known to return to their respective
hangars, where they’d stay up until all hours of the night engrossed in various
problems they needed to solve. The Air Force guys went to the House-Six bar to
roll dice, have a drink, and share war stories.

When on base, Richard Helms was known to stop in for a drink. He was a
great conversationalist but almost always refrained from telling stories about
himself. And as far as World War II was concerned, Helms rarely discussed the
subject. In 1945, as a young OSS officer, Helms had worked in postwar Berlin.
He was one of the key players in Operation Paperclip; Helms had been tasked
with finding a group of Hitler’s former scientists and offering them positions on
classified programs back in the United States. Jobs involving biological
weapons, rockets, and stealth. Years later, Helms justified his recruitment of
former Nazis by saying that if the scientists hadn’t come to work for us, they’d
have gone to work for “them.” Helms knew things other men did not know. At
the Agency he was the man who kept the secrets.

In 1975, Helms would unwittingly become an internationally recognized
figure famous for destroying CIA documents to avoid having their secrets
revealed. After allegations surfaced that the CIA had been running a human-
research program called MKULTRA—which involved mind-control experiments
using drugs such as LSD—Helms as director of the CIA was asked to take the
stand. While testifying to Congress, Helms stated that he had ordered all the
MKULTRA files destroyed two years earlier, in 1973.

In the labyrinthine organizational chart that kept men at Area 51 in their
respective places, no one was more important to the spy plane project’s overall
progress than the commander of the base, a position granted to an Air Force
officer whose salary came from the CIA. In 1965, the position was filled by
Colonel Slater. Slater was the ideal commander. He was astute, practical, and an
excellent listener, which put him in direct contrast to the more elitist Colonel
Holbury, who’d held the position before. What the pilots appreciated most about
Slater was that he was funny. Not sarcastic funny, but the kind of funny that
reminded pilots not to take their jobs so seriously all the time. One of the first
things Colonel Slater did after taking command of the base was to hang a sign
over the House-Six bar that listed Slip Slater’s Basic Rules of Flying at Groom
Lake. There were only three rules.

• Try to stay in the middle of the air.

• Do not go near the edges of it.

• The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground,
buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly

there.

Like all the pilots at Area 51, Slater flew every chance he got. Now, as
commander of the base, he began each day by making the first run. Around five
thirty each morning, coffee mug in hand, Slater was driven by one of the enlisted
men to the end of a runway, where he’d jump in an F-101 and fly around the Box
on what he called “the weather run.” Because Area 51 had a large box of
restricted airspace, Slater could fly in a manner not seen at other Air Force bases.
Colonel Roger Andersen, who had been recruited to Area 51 to work in the
command post, remembers the first time he flew with Slater in a two-seater T-33
to Groom Lake. “We were doing proficiency flying. I’d been getting teased by
the other pilots because my background was flying tankers for the Air Force, not
jets,” Andersen explains. “Up in the air, Slater says to me, ‘You need to loosen
up, Andersen, Let’s rack it around.’ At which point Slater does a loop, a roll, and
a spin... in a row. You could do that kind of thing up at Area 51.”

Everyone knew stories about Slater’s flying career: flying against the
Germans in World War II, flying as the detachment commander for the Black
Cats, and of course the remarkable story of his flying an airplane with a dead
engine for a hundred miles on a glide—through a hurricane—in 1946. As a
young hero just back from the war, Slater had been chosen by the Army Air
Forces to fly a brand-new P-80 Shooting Star on a training mission from March
Air Force Base to Jamaica. The P-80 was the first jet fighter used by the Army
Air Forces at a time when jets in America were relatively new. As Slater
remembers it, he was “one hundred miles out at sea off of Key West when the
engine quit. I was just north of Cuba, which was under hurricane. There was
turbine failure and a flameout so I turned around and glided back to the Keys.”
Jet airplanes do not normally glide without engine thrust, at least not without a
skilled pilot at the controls. When a jet engine loses all power, it usually crashes.
Slater rode the jet stream for a hundred miles over the Atlantic Ocean until he
found an abandoned airstrip at Marathon Key, in Florida, on which to land. The
amazing story made its way to the pages of the New York Times.

Richard Helms was a fan of Slater, and before leaving Area 51 to get back to
Washington, Helms made sure to congratulate Colonel Slater on all the fine work
that had been achieved to get Oxcart operational. Now Slater had to be prepared
to fly himself to Washington on a moment’s notice on Oxcart’s behalf. Over the
next several months, Slater and General Ledford would be asked to participate in
the top secret covert-action review board the 303 Committee, which would be

assigning Oxcart its mission. (The 303 Committee was a successor to the Special
Operations Group, which Bissell had been in charge of during his tenure at the
CIA.)

Slater flew himself to Washington in an F-101 more times than he could
count. There, however eloquently the Agency advocated on the Oxcart
squadron’s behalf, the Pentagon put up roadblocks. Slater’s input had little effect
on the naysayers. He was looked upon as the man in charge of a billion-dollar
black operations program, a golden goose that the Air Force desperately wanted
to wrest from the CIA. Every time the Agency proposed a mission, the review
board denied the CIA’s request.

That the groundbreaking spy plane was trapped in a stalemate between the
CIA and the Air Force was, at first, unbelievable to Colonel Slater. Throughout
his career, Slater had moved effortlessly between different armed services and
intelligence worlds, applying his talents wherever they were needed most. As a
twenty-two-year-old fighter pilot, Slater flew eighty-four missions over France
and Germany in a P-47 Thunderbolt. When the Army desperately needed
support from airmen during the Battle of the Bulge, Slater fought side by side
with soldiers on the ground at the bloody Siege of Bastogne. Later, as
commander of the Black Cat Squadron flying dangerous missions over mainland
China, Slater wore both CIA and Air Force hats with ease. The common goal
was gathering intelligence. Colonel Slater saw no rivalry among the men.

During that winter of 1966, flying back and forth between Area 51 and the
Pentagon, Slater had a front-row seat for the power struggle between the Air
Force and the CIA. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had changed his
mind again on the usefulness of Oxcart in Vietnam. He decided to wait until the
Air Force SR-71 program came online. Bud Wheelon believes that “ McNamara
was delaying finding a mission for the Oxcart on purpose. He was an empire
builder. Oxcart did not fit into his empire because it was never his.” With each
month that passed, the Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird was that much closer to
being operations-ready, and the men in charge of Blackbird were in McNamara’s
chain of command. As soon as the Air Force’s spy plane was ready, the CIA’s
almost identical spy plane would be out of a job.

In June of 1966, Richard Helms was made director of the CIA. Now one of
the most powerful men in Washington, Helms lobbied hard on Oxcart’s behalf,
and in July, the Joint Chiefs of Staff voted in favor of sending Oxcart over North
Vietnam to gather intelligence on missile sites there. McNamara and Secretary of
State Dean Rusk dug in their heels and again offered dissent. Both men argued

that putting CIA planes on the ground at the U.S. Air Force base in Okinawa,
Japan, posed too great a political risk. McNamara was playing the same card he
had played with John McCone when McCone was running the CIA, namely, that
if a CIA spy plane were to get shot down on an espionage mission, the president
would face the same backlash that Eisenhower had after the Gary Powers
incident.

In August, a vote for or against Oxcart deployment was tallied in the
presence of President Johnson. The majority voted against deployment , and the
president upheld that decision. The ice around the Oxcart program was getting
thin. Colonel Slater responded as best he knew how: when the going gets tough,
the tough keep flying. Back at Area 51, he was determined to keep his men
mission-ready. There was no point in letting his men know that the program was
on the verge of collapse. Who could have imagined that the seminal Oxcart was
in danger of being mothballed before it ever got a job? Instead, Slater gave his
men a new goal. He wanted them to shave six days off the time it took the
squadron to go from mission notification to deployment overseas. It had been a
twenty-one-day response time; Slater now wanted it reduced by nearly 30
percent .

Area 51 became like a Boy Scout camp on steroids, a stomping ground for
the world’s fastest and now most expensive airplane. The six aircraft that would
be used for deployment were put through a whole new battery of flight-
simulation tests. Commander Slater kept pilot morale high and Pentagon dissent
at bay. A bowling alley was built. The pilots kept in shape playing water sports
in the Olympic-size swimming pool. They kept their minds clear flying model
airplanes and hitting golf balls off the dry lake bed up into the hills. Even the
contractors were encouraged to pick up the pace. Slater challenged a lazy work
crew to dig a lake. Five decades later, Groom Lake’s artificial body of water
would still be referred to as Slater Lake. With the aircraft now flying at full
speed and maximum height, it was time to break performance records. In
December of 1966, one of the pilots set a speed record that would last into the
twenty-first century. Bill Park flew 10,195 miles in a little over six hours at an
average speed of 1,660 miles per hour. Park had flown over all four corners of
America and back to the base in less time than most men spend at the office on
any given day. To the project pilots itching for missions, it seemed like they
could be deployed any day. And then, in January of 1967, tragedy struck.

Project pilot Walt Ray was, by all accounts, a terrific pilot . He and his new
wife, Diane, also made for good company with Ken Collins and his wife, Jane.

Diane and Jane did not have to keep up any pretenses; they both accepted that
they had no idea what their husbands really did besides fly airplanes. The Rays
and the Collinses lived close to each other in the San Fernando Valley, and they
would often go on holidays together. “Once we took a small prop plane and flew
down to Cabo San Lucas . Mexico, and spent a couple days down there playing
tennis, swimming, and flying around,” Collins recalls. “There were so few
runways in Mexico in the early sixties, mostly we landed in big fields. The goats
would see us coming, or hear us coming; they’d run away, and we’d land. Walt
Ray loved to fly as much as I did. We’d take turns flying the airplane.” Quiet and
unassuming, Walt Ray also liked to hunt. “Right after New Year, Walt took me
with him on a RON [remain overnight] in Montana. We did some hunting, spent
the night in a motel, and flew home,” Roger Andersen remembers. The
following day, on the afternoon of January 5, 1967, Walt Ray was flying an
Oxcart on a short test flight. At the Ranch, it had been snowing. Walt Ray was
passing over the tiny town of Farmington, New Mexico, at exactly 3:22 p.m.
when he looked down and saw the black line on his fuel gauge move suddenly ,
dramatically, and dangerously to the left.

“I have a loss of fuel and I do not know where it is going,” Walt Ray told
Colonel Slater through his headset , breaking radio silence to communicate on a
radio frequency reserved for emergencies. The transcript would remain classified
until 2007. “I think I can make it,” Walt Ray said. He was 130 miles from the
tarmac at Area 51, flying subsonic to conserve fuel. But twenty minutes later,
over Hanksville, Utah, Ray declared an emergency. He’d gotten the aircraft
down to thirty thousand feet when one of its engines flamed out. The sixty-
seven-million-dollar spy plane had run out of fuel.

“I’m ejecting” was the last thing Walt Ray said to Colonel Slater.

When Walt Ray ejected, the seat he was strapped into was propelled away
from the airplane by a small rocket. The strings of his parachute became tangled
in his seat’s headrest, which meant he was unable to separate from his seat . Walt
Ray fell thirty thousand feet without a parachute and crashed into the side of a
mountain near Leith, Nevada. Within seconds of the pilot’s last transmission,
Commander Slater gave the order to dispatch three aircraft from Area 51 to go
find Walt Ray and whatever was left of his airplane. No one had any idea that the
thirty-year-old pilot was already dead. In addition to the fleet of search-and-
rescue that took off from Groom Lake, the Air Force dispatched four aircraft and
two helicopters from Nellis Air Force Base. The crash site needed to be secured
quickly before any civilians arrived on the scene.

Twenty-three hours passed. No pilot, no airplane. AU-2 was sent aloft to
photograph the general area where Walt Ray was believed to have gone down.
While the U-2 pilots flew high, Roger Andersen flew in low, in a T-33 . The
terrain was challenging, and it was difficult to see the ground. “There was cactus
and vegetation everywhere; we had to conserve fuel and fly as low as we could,”
Andersen explains. Helicopter pilot Charlie Trapp found the aircraft first . “I saw
these large film pieces rolling across the top of a ridge,” Trapp recalls. “I landed
where I could and let my parajumpers jump out. They ran over to the Oxcart,
what was left of it, and when they came back they said, ‘Walt’s not in there and
neither is his ejection seat.’” The Oxcart had crashed in the remote high desert
on a mountain slope dotted with chaparral. Trapp and his crew went back to
Area 51 and, with the navigators’ help, mapped out on the board in the command
post all the places where Walt Ray might have landed after ejection. Then they
went back out and continued the search.

Charlie Trapp found Walt Ray uphill from the crash site, three miles away. “I
caught a glimpse of light reflecting from his helmet,” Trapp recalls. “He was still
in his seat, under a large cedar tree.” A perimeter was set up and the dirt roads
leading up to the crash site were barricaded and secured by armed guards. Herds
of wild horses watched as trucks rolled in and workers carted up the jet
wreckage to take back to Groom Lake. The entire process took nine days. After
an investigation, officials determined that a faulty fuel gauge was all that was
wrong with the triple-sonic spy plane. At first, the gauge had erroneously
indicated to Walt Ray he had enough fuel to get back to the Ranch. Minutes later
the gauge told him he was about to run out of fuel.

One man’s tragedy can become another man’s opportunity, which is what
happened to Frank Murray after Walt Ray was killed. After the accident, General
Ledford came out to the area to participate in the ensuing investigation. When
Ledford was ready to return to Washington, he asked Frank Murray to fly him
home. “Up in the air,” Murray recalls, “Ledford said to me over the radio,
‘How’d you like to fly the plane?’ I said, ‘Throw me in that puddle, boss’ and
that was about the extent of the pilot-selection process for me.” Murray was
given Walt Ray’s call sign of Dutch 20. No longer a chase pilot, Murray was
now part of the CIA’s elite team of overhead espionage pilots.

Defense Department officials used the tragic death of Walt Ray and the loss
of another CIA aircraft to their advantage. The Office of the Budget and the
Office of the Secretary of Defense met alone, in secret, without representation
from the CIA. There, they highlighted the fact that the CIA’s several-hundred-

million-dollar black budget operation had produced fifteen airplanes, five of
which had already crashed. They presented their findings to President Johnson
with the recommendation that the Oxcart program be “phased out.”

Richard Helms was furious. In an eight-page letter to the president , he told
Johnson that to mothball the Oxcart would be a scandalous waste of an asset .

The CIA had successfully and meticulously managed 435 spy plane overflights
by the U-2 in thirty hostile countries, and only one, the Gary Powers crash, had
produced an international incident, Helms said. But the Gary Powers incident
had actually strengthened the argument as to why the CIA, not the Air Force,
should run the spy plane program, Helms explained. It was because Powers was
an intelligence officer, and not a military man, that the Soviets hadn’t taken
retaliatory action against the United States. Ultimately Powers had been released
in a Soviet spy exchange. Helms further strengthened his argument by stating
that, unlike the military, the CIA “controls no nuclear weapons , which mles out
any propaganda suggestion that an irrational act by some subordinate
commander might precipitate a nuclear war.” Helms had a point. But would the
president see things his way ?

The following month, in February of 1967, Colonel Slater was again
summoned to Washington. It was his fifth trip in six months. In a roomful of 303
Committee members, Slater was told the Oxcart would be terminated effective
January 1, 1968. There was no room for debate. The Oxcart’s fate had been
decided. The case was closed. Slater was instructed to return to Area 51 and
keep his squadron operations ready while the Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird
passed its final flight tests. Even though Colonel Slater was Air Force to his core
he was very much for the CIA’s Oxcart program. Slater was the program’s
commander, and at that moment, the Oxcart was undeniably the most remarkable
aircraft in the world.

Colonel Slater had flown himself to Washington in an F-101 and now he had
to fly himself home. He was uncharacteristically disheartened by it all. Stopping
at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to refuel, Slater showed his identification
documents, which pushed him to the front of the refueling line, ahead of a two-
star general who had been waiting there. With everyone staring at him and
wondering who this officer was, Slater considered the irony of it all. In justifying
why Oxcart was being terminated, the 303 Committee claimed that the Oxcart
exemplified CIA black budget excess. From Slater’s perspective, save for a few
line-cutting perks, the Oxcart was worth every Agency dime. The scientific
barriers broken by the Oxcart program would likely impress scientists and

engineers in another thirty years. It was the incredible sense of achievement
shared by everyone involved that Slater would miss most. But so it goes, thought
Slater. Oxcart would never get a mission, and the American public would
probably never know what the CIA had been able to accomplish, in total secrecy,
at Groom Lake—at least not for a long time.

Colonel Slater waited for his airplane to be refueled and thought about the
journey home, likely his last from DC to Area 51. It was a mistake to cancel
Oxcart, Slater thought. But he also knew that his opinion didn’t matter. His skills
as a commander were what he was counted on for. He would return to Area 51
and, like all good military men, follow orders.

Three months later, on a balmy spring day in May of 1967, Colonel Slater
decided he was going to take the Oxcart for a last ride. Some of the pilots had
four hundred hours in the air in the Oxcart. Walt Ray had had 358 when he died.
Colonel Slater had only ten. Why not take the world’s most scientifically
advanced aircraft out for a ride while he still had the chance? Soon, the Oxcart
would disappear into the experimental-test-plane graveyard. There, it would
collect dust in some secret military hangar way out in Palmdale, California,
where no one would ever fly it again. Slater went to visit Werner Weiss to see if
Weiss could arrange for Slater to take one last Mach 3 ride.

“Consider it done,” Werner Weiss said to Colonel Slater’s request.

Up in the air, Slater quickly took the Oxcart to seventy thousand feet. Slater
had forgotten how light the Oxcart was. It had an airframe like a butterfly, which
allowed pilots to get it up so high. Flying at Mach 2.5 made things hot inside the
cockpit. It was like an oven set on warm. If Slater were to take off his glove and
touch the window, he’d get a second-degree burn. He moved up to Mach 3
cruising speed at ninety thousand feet, traveling the seven hundred miles to
Billings, Montana, in about twenty-three minutes.

The fallacy was that at this height and speed, a pilot could look out the
window and take in the view. You couldn’t. Even when you reached cruising
height, you had to keep your eyes on every gauge, oscillator, and scope in front
of you. There were too many things to pay attention to. Too many things that
could go wrong.

Colonel Slater headed toward the Canadian border, where he took a left turn
and flew along the U.S. perimeter until he reached Washington State. There, he
took another left turn and flew down over Oregon and into California. Finally, he

took the aircraft down to twenty-five thousand feet and prepared for a scheduled
refuel. Minutes later, Slater met up with the KC-135 that had been dispatched
from the Air Force’s 903rd Air Refueling Squadron out of Beale Air Force Base
in Yuba County, California.

The process of taking on fuel was one of the more dangerous things an
Oxcart pilot could do. In order to connect its fuel line to the tanker, the aircraft
had to slow down to between 350 and 450 mph, so slow it could barely keep its
grip on the sky. The issue of speed was equally taxing on the flying fuel tank.

The KC-135 tanker had to travel at its top speed just to keep up with the slowed-
down triple-sonic airplane. This was always a slightly nerve-racking process,
complicated for Colonel Slater by the fact that a call came in over the emergency
radio at exactly that time. Whatever was going on back at Area 51 that merited
this emergency call was most likely not a welcome event.

Slater answered. It was Colonel Paul Bacalis, the man who’d taken over
Ledford’s job as director of the Office of Special Activities for the CIA. Bacalis
told Slater that an urgent call had come in for him from the Pentagon and he
should get back to Area 51 immediately.

“I’m refueling,” Colonel Slater said.

“Finish and dump it,” Bacalis said.

“Can’t it wait?” Colonel Slater asked.

“No,” Bacalis said. “Where are you?”

“I’m over California,” Colonel Slater said.

“Head out to sea, dump the fuel, and come home” was Colonel Bacalis’s
command.

Slater let loose forty thousand pounds of fuel and watched it evaporate into
the atmosphere. It was critical that he save ten thousand gallons of fuel to get
home, not much more and definitely not less. Too little fuel and you wound up
like Walt Ray. Too much fuel meant the aircraft could blow out its brakes on
landing and overshoot the runway. Now, Slater needed to make a quick U-turn to
head home. When traveling three times the speed of sound, the Oxcart needed
186 miles of space just to make the hook. This meant Slater’s U-turn took him
from off the coast of Big Sur to high above Santa Barbara on a tight curve.

When Slater got back to base, Werner Weiss and Colonel Bacalis were
waiting in his office. Both men wore grins. Colonel Bacalis dialed the Pentagon
and handed Slater the telephone. As the phone rang, Bacalis told Slater what was
happening so as to prepare him for the call.

Colonel Slater couldn’t believe his ears.

“The president has given Oxcart a go/” Slater recalls Bacalis saying, and
that “orders are en route.” Then came the ultimate challenge—one for which he
was prepared. Bacalis asked Slater if he could deploy his men for Oxcart
missions starting in fifteen days.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Operation Black Shield and the Secret History of the USS

Pueblo

The new director of the CIA, Richard M. Helms, had to work hard to become a
member of President Johnson’s inner coterie. The president had once told his
CIA director that he “never found much use for intelligence.” But eventually
Helms managed to acquire a coveted seat at the president’s Tuesday lunch table.
There, President Johnson and his closest advisers discussed foreign policy each
week. Outsiders called the luncheons Target Tuesdays because so much of what
was discussed involved which North Vietnamese city to bomb. In 1967, air
battles were raging in the skies over Hanoi and Haiphong with so many more
American pilots getting shot down than enemy pilots that the ratio became nine
to one. The Pentagon had been unable to locate the surface-to-air missile sites in
North Vietnam responsible for so many of the shoot-downs although they’d been
looking for them all year. Thirty-seven U-2 missions had been flown since
January, as had hundreds of low-flying Air Force drones. Still, the Pentagon had
no clear sense of where exactly the Communist missile sites were located. There
were other fears. The Russians were rumored to be supplying the North
Vietnamese with surface-to-surface missiles, ones with enough range to reach
American troops stationed in the south.

Which is how the Oxcart, already scheduled for cancellation, serendipitously
got its mission—during a Target Tuesday lunch . On May 16, 1967, Helms made
one last play on behalf of the CIA’s beloved spy plane, nine years in the making
but just a few days away from being mothballed for good. Helms told the
president that by deploying the Oxcart on missions over North Vietnam, war
planners could get those high-resolution photographs of the missile sites they

had been looking for. “Sharp point photographs, not smudged circles,” Helms
promised the president. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, angling hard
for Air Force control of aerial reconnaissance, had promised the president that
the SR-71 Blackbird, the Air Force version of the Oxcart, was almost operations-
ready. But the mission had to happen now, CIA director Helms told the
president. It was already May. Come June, Southeast Asia would be inundated
with monsoons. Weather was critical for good photographs, Helms said.

Cameras can’t photograph through clouds. President Johnson was convinced.
Before the dessert arrived, Johnson authorized the CIA’s Oxcart to deploy to
Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan.

It was a coup for the CIA. By the following morning, the airlift to Kadena
from Area 51 had begun. The 1129th Special Activities Squadron was being
deployed for Operation Black Shield. A million pounds of materiel. 260 support
crew , six pilots, and three airplanes were en route to the East China Sea. Nine
years after Kelly Johnson presented physicist Edward Lovick with his drawing
of the first Oxcart, Johnson would write in his log notes: “the bird should leave
the nest.”

Kadena Air Base was located on the island of Okinawa just north of the Tropic
of Cancer in the East China Sea. It was an island scarred by a violent backstory,
haunted by hundreds of thousands of war dead. Okinawa had been home to the
single largest land-sea-air battle in the history of the world. This was the same
plot of land where, twenty-two years earlier, the Allied Forces fought the
Japanese. Okinawa was the last island before mainland Japan. Over the course of
eighty-two days in the spring of 1945, the battle for the Pacific reached its
zenith. At Okinawa, American casualties would total 38,000 wounded and
12,000 killed or missing. Japan’s losses were inconceivable in today’s wars:
107,000 soldiers dead and as many as 100,000 civilians killed. When Lieutenant
General Ushijima Mitsuru finally capitulated, giving the island over to U.S.
forces on June 21, 1945, he did so with so much shame in his heart that he
committed suicide the following day. Thousands of Okinawans felt the same
way and leaped off the island’s high coral walls. After the smoke settled and the
blood soaked into the earth, Okinawa belonged to the U.S. military. Two decades
later, it still did.

By the time Ken Collins stepped foot on Okinawa, the Kadena Air Base
occupied more than 10 percent of the island and accounted for nearly 40 percent

of all islanders’ income . The 1129th Special Activities Squadron was stationed at
a secluded part of the base, the place from where Operation Black Shield would
launch. No one was supposed to know the squadron was there. The project pilots
were to keep an extremely low profile , living in a simple arrangement of
Quonset huts almost identical to those at Area 51. Instead of on the sand-and-
sagebrush landscape at Area 51, the facilities on Kadena sat in fields of green
grass. Leafy ficus trees grew along little pathways. It was spring when the pilots
arrived, which meant tropical flowers were in full bloom. The pilots’ residence
was called Morgan Manor. An American cook kept the pilots fed, serving up
high-protein diets on request. On days off the pilots drank bottled beer.
Sometimes the men ventured out to have a drink or eat a meal at the officers’
club, where a full Filipino orchestra always played American dance tunes.

The Oxcart mission was covert and classified, and there would be “no
plausible cover story” as to why an oddly shaped, triple-sonic aircraft would be
flying in and out of the air base with regularity for the next year. For this reason,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that Commander Slater “focus on security, not
cover.” One idea was to “create the illusion of some sort of environmental or
technical testing involved.” But no one believed that cover story would hold.
Within a week of the first Oxcart landing on the tarmac at Kadena, an ominous-
looking Russian trawler sailed into port and anchored within viewing distance of
the extralong runway. “The Russians knew we were there and we knew they
knew we were there,” Colonel Slater recalls.

Impossible as it seemed, the first Oxcart mission over the demilitarized zone in
North Vietnam occurred as promised, just fifteen days after Helms made history
for the CIA at that Target Tuesday lunch in May. CIA pilot Mele Vojvodich was
assigned the first mission. He took off at 11:00 a.m. local time in a torrential
downpour—the Oxcart’s first real ride in the rain. In the little more than nine
minutes Vojvodich spent over North Vietnam, at a speed of Mach 3.1 and an
altitude of 80,000 feet, the Oxcart photographed 70 of the 190 suspected surface-
to-air missile sites. The mission went totally undetected by the Chinese and the
North Vietnamese.

After the first mission was completed, the film was sent to a special
processing center inside the Eastman Kodak plant in Rochester, New York. But
by the time the photographic intelligence got back to field commanders in
Vietnam, the intelligence was already several days old. The North Vietnamese

were moving missile sites and mock-ups of missile sites around faster than
anyone could keep track of them. The CIA realized it needed a dramatically
faster turn-around time, which resulted in a photo center being quickly set up on
the mainland in Japan. Soon, field commanders had intel in their hands just
twenty-four hours from the completion of an Oxcart mission over North
Vietnam.

Still, that did not stop the North Vietnamese from moving their missiles
around and avoiding bombing raids. They had help from the Soviet Union. “That
was the reason for the Russian trawler parked at the end of the Kadena runway.
Someone was watching and taking notes every time we flew,” recalls Roger
Andersen, who was stationed in the command post on Kadena, which he’d been
in charge of setting up. “It was almost identical to the command post at Area 51,
except it was smaller,” Andersen says.

On Kadena, the operations officers tried to trick the Russian spies in the
trawler by flying at night, and yet of the first seven Black Shield missions flown,
four were “detected and tracked.” The North Vietnamese were able to predict
Oxcart’s overhead pass based on the time the aircraft left the base. With this
information relayed by the Russians, the Communists’ Fan Song guidance radar
was able to lock on the A-12’s beacon. The first attempted shoot-down happened
during Operation Black Shield’s sixteenth mission. In photographs taken by the
Oxcart, contrails of surface-to-air missiles can be seen below. Fortunately for the
pilots, the missiles could not get up as high as the Oxcart. In this newest round of
cat and mouse, Oxcart was resulting in a draw. Oxcart was fast, high, and
stealthy. The aircraft could not be shot down. But the enemy knew the plane was
there, meaning it was a long way from being invisible as Richard Bissell and
President Eisenhower had originally planned.

For American pilots flying over North Vietnam, the real danger remained
down low, halfway between Oxcart and the earth, at around forty-five thousand
feet. That was where the surface-to-air missiles and the MiG fighter jets were
shooting down U.S. pilots at the horrifying nine-to-one rate. Ken Collins recalled
what this felt like at the time: “During Black Shield, we, as pilots, were
relatively safe at eighty-five thousand feet. It was the pilots who were flying
lower than us who were really the ones in harm’s way. These were guys most of
us had been in the Air Force with, before we got sheep-dipped and began flying
for the CIA.”

Extraordinary pilots like Hervey Stockman. Stockman had been the first man
to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2, on July 4, 1956. Eleven years later, on

June 11, 1967, Stockman was flying over North Vietnam, searching for
information about North Vietnam weapons depots, when he was involved in a
midair crash . A pilot of exceptional skill and remarkable courage, Stockman was
on his 310th mission in a career that had covered three wars when his F-4 C
Phantom fighter jet collided with another airplane in his wing. He and Ronald
Webb both survived the bailout. Upon landing, they were captured by North
Vietnamese soldiers, beaten, and taken prisoner. Stockman would spend the next
five years and 268 days as a prisoner of war in a seven-by-seven-foot cell. First
he was housed in the notoriously bmtal Hanoi Hilton. Later, he was moved to
other, equally grim prisons over the course of his incarceration. During Black
Shield, the CIA tasked Oxcart pilots with search missions to find U.S. airmen
who’d gone down over North Vietnam. The cameras on the Oxcarts took miles
of photographs, seeking information on the prison complexes where American
heroes like Hervey Stockman and hundreds of other POWs were being held, but
to no avail. The North Vietnamese moved captured POWs around almost as
often as they moved missile sites around.

The captured pilots became a purposeful part of Communist propaganda
campaigns against the West. The POWs were beaten, tortured, chained, and
dragged out in front of cameras, often forced to denounce the United States. If
the Communists wanted to create unrest at home, which they did, they succeeded
by using captured pilots for their own propaganda gains. All across America,
opposition to the war was on the rise. The White House and the Pentagon fought
back with propaganda and erroneous facts. “We are beginning to win this
struggle,” Vice President Hubert Humphrey boasted on NBC’s Today show in
November of 1967. While closed-door hearings for the Senate Armed Services
Committee revealed that U.S. bombing campaigns were having little to no effect
on winning the war, Humphrey told America that more Communists were laying
down arms than picking them up. That our anti-Communist “purification”
programs in Vietnam were going well. Later that same month, America’s top
commander, General Westmoreland, dug his own grave. He told the National
Press Club that the Communists were “unable to mount a major offensive.” That
America might have been losing the war in 1965, but now America was winning
in Vietnam. In an interview with Time magazine, Westmoreland taunted the
Communists by calling them weak. “I hope they try something because we are
looking for a fight.” he declared. Which is exactly what he got. At the end of
January, the Communists pretended to agree to a three-day cease-fire to celebrate
the new year, which in Vietnamese is called Tet Nguyen Dan. Instead, it was a

double-cross. On January 31, 1968, the Communists launched a surprise attack
on the U.S. military and the forces of South Vietnam. The notorious Tet
Offensive stunned the Pentagon. It also resulted in violent antiwar protests. The
Tet Offensive was a major turning point in America’s losing the Vietnam War.

It was at this same time that another major crisis occurred, one in which Oxcart
played a secret role, the precise details of which were only made public in 2007.
On the foggy morning of January 23, 1968, approximately two thousand miles to
the northeast of Vietnam, the U.S. Navy ship USS Pueblo sailed into icy waters
off the coast of North Korea and dropped anchor. The Pueblo’s cover story was
that it was conducting scientific research; really, it was on an espionage mission ,
a joint NSA-Navy operation with the goal of gathering signals intelligence, or
SIGINT. In addition to the regular crew, there were twenty-eight signals
intelligence specialists working behind locked doors in a separate and restricted
part of the vessel. Parked 15.8 miles off North Korea’s Ung-do Island,
technically the Pueblo was floating in international waters.

North Korea’s Communist regime did not see it that way. The ship was close
enough to be eavesdropping on Wonson harbor, which made it an open target for
the North Korean People’s Army, the KPA. After one of the Pueblo’s crew
members picked up on radar that a KPA ship was approaching fast, Pueblo’s
captain, Lloyd M. Bucher, went up to the bridge to have a look around. Through
his binoculars, Bucher saw not just a military ship but one with its rocket
launchers aimed directly at the Pueblo. Bucher ordered certain flags to be raised,
ones that indicated the USS Pueblo was on a surveying mission, something the
North Koreans obviously already did not buy. Within minutes, Chief Warrant
Officer Gene Lacy spotted several small vessels on the horizon: torpedo boats
coming from Wonson. Next, two MiG-21 fighter jets appeared on the scene .

Captain Bucher now had a national security nightmare on his hands. His boat
was filled with thousands of classified papers, cryptographic manuals, and
encryption machines. Most significantly, the Pueblo carried a KW-7 cipher
machine, which was the veritable Rosetta stone of naval encryption. The captain
considered sinking his ship , which would take forty-seven minutes, but later
explained that he knew if he had done so a gun battle was certain to ensue. Most
of the Pueblo’s life rafts would be shot at and destroyed. Without life rafts, the
men would die in the icy waters in a matter of minutes, Bucher was certain. He
made the decision to flee.

The North Korean ship raised a flag that signaled “Heave to or I will open
fire on you.” Captain Bucher raised a signal flag in response: “Thank you for
your consideration. I am departing the area.” But the North Koreans opened fire.
Bucher himself was hit, taking shrapnel in his foot and backside. As the Pueblo
took off, the North Koreans continued to fire, killing a U.S. sailor named Duane
Hodges. Meanwhile, behind the secret door, SIGINT specialists smashed cipher
equipment with axes and shoved documents into a small incinerator there.
Despite the speed at which the analysts worked to burn the secret papers, 90
percent of the documents survived . Sixty-one minutes after being shot, Captain
Bucher was no longer in control of his ship. The North Korean People’s Army
stormed the Pueblo and took the captain and his eighty-two crew members
hostage. For the first time in 160 years, an American vessel had been seized by a
foreign nation. The timing could not have been worse. America was already
losing one war.

President Johnson was outraged. Within hours of the Pueblo’s capture, the
Pentagon began secretly preparing for war against North Korea. The following
day, McNamara summoned the war council to lay out plans for a ground attack.
“Our primary objective is to get the men of the Pueblo back,” McNamara said,
emphasizing just how secret his plan was to remain: “No word of the discussion
in this meeting should go beyond this room.” A stunning air attack over North
Korea was laid out. An estimated fifteen thousand tons of bombs would be
dropped from the air to complement the ground assault. Given the huge numbers
of soldiers and airmen fighting in Vietnam, the war with North Korea would
require a call-up of the reserves. A massive U.S. strategic airlift was set in
motion, designated Operation Combat Fox. That the North Vietnamese were just
six days from launching the sneak attack called the Tet Offensive was not yet
known. A war with North Korea over the USS Pueblo would have been a war
America could ill afford.

Richard Helms suggested an Oxcart be dispatched from nearby Kadena to
photograph North Korea’s coast and try to locate the USS Pueblo before anyone
even considered making a next move. As it stood, immediately after the Pueblo’s
capture, there was no intelligence indicating exactly where the sailors were or
where the ship was being held. Richard Helms counseled the president that if the
goal was to get the eighty-two American sailors back, a ground attack or air
attack couldn’t possibly achieve that end if no one knew where the USS Pueblo
was. A reconnaissance mission would also enable the Pentagon to see if
Pyongyang was mobilizing its troops for war over the event. Most important of

all, it would give the crisis a necessary diplomatic pause.

Three days after the Pueblo’s capture, on January 26, Oxcart pilot Jack
Weeks was dispatched on a sortie from Kadena to locate the missing ship. From
the photographs Weeks took on that overflight, the United States pinpointed the
Pueblo’s exact location as it floated in the dark-watered harbor in Changjahwan
Bay. Before completing his mission but after taking the necessary photographs,
Jack Weeks experienced aircraft problems. When he got back to base, he told his
fellow pilots about the problems he’d had on the flight but not about his
photographic success; detailed information regarding the USS Pueblo was so
highly classified, very few individuals had any idea that Weeks’s mission had
delivered photographs that had prevented war with North Korea.

“The [Oxcart] quickly located the captured Pueblo at anchor in Wonson
harbor,” President Johnson’s national security adviser Walt Rostow revealed in
1994. “ So we had to abandon any plans to hit them with airpower . All that
would accomplish would be to kill a lot of people including our own. But the
[Oxcart’s] photo take provided proof that our ship and our men were being held.
The Koreans couldn’t lie about that.” The Pentagon’s secret war plan against
North Korea was called off. Instead, negotiations for the sailors’ return began.
But the ever-suspicious administration, now deeply embroiled in political fallout
from the Tet Offensive, worried the Pueblo incident could very well be another
Communist double cross. What if North Korea was secretly mobilizing its troops
for war? Three and a half weeks later, on February 19, 1968, Frank Murray was
assigned to fly Oxcart’s second mission over North Korea . Murray’s
photographs indicated that North Korea’s army was still not mobilizing for
battle. But by then, the Pueblo was on its way to Pyongyang, where it remains
today—the only American naval vessel held in captivity by a foreign power.
Captain Bucher and his men were prisoners of North Korea for eleven months,
tortured, put through mock executions, and made to confess espionage before
finally being released. In 2008, a U.S, federal judge determined that North Korea
should pay sixty-five million dollars in damages to several of the Pueblo’s crew,
but North Korea has yet to respond.

A year had passed since Black Shield began. It was springtime on Kadena again.
On days off Ken Collins and fellow pilot Jack Weeks would slip into their
canvas shoes and swimming tmnks and head out to the beach. The drive into the
countryside was beautiful and relaxing, with its tropical bamboo forests and

small ponds. Camellias and Japanese apricot trees were in bloom. There were
beautiful sunsets to watch over the East China Sea. “We had a different rapport,
Jack and I, than the other pilots, I think. We did more than just get along. Jack
Weeks and I became friends,” Collins says.

When the two pilots weren’t at the beach, Collins and Weeks would take the
1129th Special Activities Squadron staff car, “an old clunker of a station
wagon,” and head into Kozu, a sprawling little city of cement-block high-rises
and crooked telephone poles. “Jack and I had kids who were about the same age.
We’d head into Kozu and buy these little plastic airplanes and remote-control
tank models which we intended to bring home to our kids. But sometimes we’d
get bored back in Morgan Manor and open up the toy packages and end up
making the little tank models for ourselves,” Collins recalls. “We had a lot of fun
doing that.” Life’s simple pleasures during the Vietnam War.

The Agency’s six Oxcart pilots—Mele Vojvodich Jr., Jack W. Weeks, J.
“Frank” Murray, Ronald J. “Jack” Layton, Dennis B. Sullivan, and Kenneth B.
Collins—had collectively flown twenty-nine missions : twenty-four over North
Vietnam, three over North Korea, and two over Cambodia and Laos. Countless
surface-to-air missile sites had been located and destroyed as a result. Despite
Pentagon fears, the photographs never located a single surface-to-surface missile
able to reach American forces on the ground. “We also flew overhead during Air
Force bombing raids, using our jamming systems on the bird to mess with the
Communists’ antiaircraft systems,” Murray recalls. But for all the success of the
CIA’s Oxcart program, the reality was that the Air Force’s Blackbird, the SR-71,
was finally ready to deploy. The CIA could no longer compete with the Pentagon
for Mach 3 missions, and the Oxcart program reached its inevitable end. “Even
if you didn’t have a ‘need-to-know,’ it was obvious when the SR-71 Blackbirds
started showing up,” Collins recalls. The Blackbirds were arriving on Kadena to
take Oxcart’s place . The Air Force version of the Oxcart, with its two seats and
reconnaissance/strike modifications, had officially won the battle between the
CIA and the Air Force over anything with wings.

Back in Washington, behind closed doors, Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara told President Johnson he no longer believed the war in Vietnam
could be won. This did not sit well with the president, and in February of 1968,
Robert McNamara stepped down. In his place came a new secretary of defense
named Clark Clifford who “ reaffirmed the original decision to end the A-12
program and mothball the aircraft.” The men from the 1129th began packing up
to head home to Area 51. The missions were over. The drawdown phase had

begun.

Jack Weeks and Denny Sullivan were each given the assignment of flying an
A-12 Oxcart back to Area 51; Collins was scheduled to do final engine tests
from Kadena. But during the last weeks of the program, Jack Weeks became ill ,
so Collins stepped in, completing back-to-back rotations in Weeks’s place. With
the schedule change, it would now be Collins and Sullivan who would fly the A-
12s home, with Weeks doing the final engine check, on June 4, 1968, and not
Collins, as originally planned.

Collins and Sullivan returned to Area 51 to keep up on proficiency flying in
preparation for their final transcontinental flights. When it was time to return to
Kadena, they flew from Groom Lake to Burbank in a Lockheed propeller plane
and then took a commercial flight from the West Coast all the way to Tokyo.
“That night, we had dinner in the Tokyo Hilton,” Collins remembers. “We
finished up dinner and were heading back up to the rooms when we heard on the
radio that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles.” Stunned,
Collins went downstairs to buy a newspaper, the English-language version of the
Tokyo Times. “There, in the lower right-hand corner of the paper, a small article
caught my eye. The headline read something like 'High-Altitude Crash of a U.S.
Air Force Airplane.’ Well, that was enough to get my attention. I had a terrible
feeling I knew what ‘high-altitude’ meant.”

The following day, Collins and Sullivan flew to the island of Kadena. An
Agency driver picked them up at the airport. As soon as the door shut and the
men were alone, the driver turned around and said solemnly, “We lost an
airplane.”

“We lost a pilot,” Collins said.

It was former U-2 pilot Tony Bevacqua who was assigned to fly the search
mission for Jack Weeks and his missing airplane. After Bevacqua had left
Groom Lake , in 1957, he’d spent the next eight years flying dangerous U-2
reconnaissance missions and atomic sampling missions all over the world, from
Alaska to Argentina. During the Vietnam War, Bevacqua flew SR-71
reconnaissance missions over Hanoi. (On one mission, on July 26. 1968 . the
photographs taken from the camera on his Blackbird show two SA-2 missiles
being fired up at him.) But no single mission would stay with him into old age
like the mission he was asked to fly on June 5, 1968, looking for Jack Weeks.

Bevacqua had arrived on Kadena the month before, having been selected to

fly the Air Force version of the Oxcart, the SR-71. “All I had been told that day
was that someone was missing,” Bevacqua remembers. “I didn’t have a need to
know more. But I think I knew that the pilot was CIA.” The downed pilot, he
learned, might be floating somewhere in the South China Sea, approximately
520 miles east of the Philippines and 625 miles south of Okinawa. “As I set out,
my heart was pumped up and I was thinking, Maybe I will find this guy. I
remember anticipation. Hopeful anticipation of maybe seeing a little yellow life
raft floating somewhere in that giant sea.” Instead, Bevacqua saw nothing but
hundreds of miles of open water. “It was like looking for a drop of water in the
ocean,” Bevacqua remembers. The day after the mission, Bevacqua went to the
photo interpreters to ask if they’d found anything on the film. “They said, ‘No,
sorry. Not a thing.’ And that was the end of that,” Bevacqua explains.

Jack Weeks was gone. Vanished into the sea. Neither his body nor any part of
the airplane was ever recovered. “Fate is a hunter,” Collins muses, recalling the
destiny of his friend Jack Weeks. “I was supposed to be flying that aircraft that
day but Jack got sick and we switched in the rotation. Jack Weeks went down.
I’m still here.”

The 1129th Special Activities Squadron had reached its end . The CIA held a
special secret ceremony at Area 51 for the remaining Oxcart pilots and their
wives. Some of the pilots had their pictures taken with the aircraft but did not
receive copies for their scrapbooks or walls. “The pictures went into a vault,”
says Colonel Slater. “We were told we could have copies of them when, or if, the
project got declassified.” Roger Andersen recalls how quickly the operation
rolled up. “By that time, in 1968, there were a lot of other operations going on at
Area 51, none of which I had a need-to-know.” Andersen had the distinction of
flying the last Project Oxcart support plane, a T-33, back to Edwards Air Force
Base. “Flying out of Area 51,1 knew I’d miss it up there,” Andersen says. “Even
after all these years, and having lived all over the world, I can say that Area 51 is
unlike anywhere else in the world.” For certain, there would be no more barrel
rolls with Colonel Slater over Groom Lake.

The men moved on . If you are career Air Force or CIA, you go where you are
assigned. Ken Collins was recruited by the Air Force into the SR-71 program.
Because the A-12 program was classified, no one in the SR-71 program had any
idea Collins had already put in hundreds of hours flying in the Mach 3 airplane.
“It left many in the SR-71 program confused. It surprised many people when it

appeared I already knew how to fly the aircraft that was supposedly just built.
They didn’t have a need-to-know what I had spent the last six years of my life
doing. They didn’t learn for decades,” not until the Oxcart program was
declassified, in 2007.

Frank Murray volunteered to fight on the ground, or at least low to the
ground, in Vietnam. “During Black Shield, no one had any idea where I’d been.
Quite a few people thought maybe I’d dodged the war. I decided to go back in
and fly airplanes in combat in Vietnam.” In November of 1970, Murray was sent
to the Nakhon Phanom Air Base on the Mekong River across from Laos, where
he volunteered to fly the A-l Skyraider—a propeller-driven, single-seat airplane
that was an anachronism in the jet age. “It flew about a hundred and sixty-five
miles per hour at cruise,” says Murray. “I went from flying the fastest airplane in
the world to the slowest one. The Oxcart taxied faster than the A-l flew.”
Because the Skyraider flew so slow, it was one of the easiest targets for the
Vietcong. One in four Skyraiders sent on rescue missions was shot down. “We
got shot at often but the Skyraider had armaments and I shot back.” In his one-
year tour of duty, Murray, the squadron commander, flew sixty-four combat
missions. The Skyraider’s most famous role was as the escort for the helicopters
sent in to rescue wounded soldiers from the battlefield. “Our mission was to
support the Jolly Green Giants. We pulled quite a few wounded Green Berets out
of the battlefield that year.”

Colonel Slater was assigned to the position of vice commander of the
Twentieth Tactical Fighter Wing at the Wethersfield Air Force Base in England.
By all accounts, he was well on the way to becoming a general in the U.S. Air
Force. Then tragedy struck. Colonel Slater’s eldest daughter, Stacy, was in Sun
Valley, Idaho, on her honeymoon when the private plane she was flying in with
her husband struck a mountain peak and crashed. Stranded on the side of a
frozen mountain for twenty-four hours, Stacy Slater Bernhardt was paralyzed
from the waist down. The recovery process was going to be long and painful,
and the outcome was entirely unknown. “My wife, Barbara, and I needed to be
with our daughter, with our family, so I requested to be transferred back to the
United States,” Colonel Slater says. For Slater, a career military man, the
decision was simple. “Love of country, love of family.”

Back in America, and after many months, his daughter recovered with near-
miraculous results (she learned to walk with crutches). Colonel Slater was
assigned to Edwards Air Force Base, where he began flying the Air Force’s
attack version of the Oxcart, the YF-12, which comes equipped to carry two

250-kiloton nuclear bombs. “I loved it,” Slater says, always the optimist. “I
enjoyed working for the CIA, but no matter how old I get, I will always be
fighter pilot at heart.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The MiGs of Area SI

To engineer something is to apply scientific and technical know-how to create
an entity from parts. To reverse engineer something is to take another
manufacturer’s or scientist’s product apart with the specific purpose of learning
how it was constructed or composed. The concept of reverse engineering is
uniquely woven into Area 51 legend and lore, with conspiracy theorists claiming
Area 51 engineers are reverse engineering alien spacecraft inside the secret base.
Historically, reverse engineering has played an important role at Area 51, as
exemplified in formerly classified programs, including one from the late 1960s
and 1970s, to reverse engineer Russian MiGs.

It began one scorching-hot morning in August of 1966 when an Iraqi Air
Force colonel named Munir Redfa climbed into his MiG-21 fighter jet at an air
base in southern Iraq and headed toward Baghdad. Redfa then made a sudden
turn to the west and began racing toward Jordan. Iraqi ground control notified
Redfa that he was off course.

“Turn back immediately.” he was told. Instead, Redfa began flying in a
zigzag pattern. Recognizing this as an evasive maneuver, an Iraqi air force
commander told Colonel Redfa if he didn’t turn back at once he would be shot
down. Defying orders, Redfa switched off his radio and began flying low to the
ground. To avoid radar lock, in some places he flew as low as seven hundred and
fifty feet. Once he was at altitude, Redfa flew over Turkey , then toward the
Mediterranean. But his final destination was the enemy state of Israel. There,
one million U.S. dollars was waiting for him in a bank account in Tel Aviv.

Six hundred miles to the west, the head of the Israeli air force, Major General
Mordechai Hod, waited anxiously for Munir Redfa’s MiG to appear as a blip on

his own radar screen. When it finally appeared, General Hod scrambled a group
of delta-wing Mirage fighters to escort Redfa to a secret base in the Negev
Desert. It was a groundbreaking event. Israel was now the first democratic nation
to have in its possession a Russian-made MiG-21, the top gun fighter not just in
Russia and its Communist proxies but throughout the Arab world.

The plan had been years in the making. Four years, to be exact, dating back
to 1963, when Meir Amit first became head of the Mossad. Amit sat down with
the Israeli air force and asked them what they would consider the single greatest
foreign-intelligence contribution to national security. The answer was short,
simple, and unanimous: bring us an MiG. The enemy air forces of Syria, Egypt,
Jordan, and Iraq all flew Russian MiGs. Before Redfa’s defection, the Mossad
had tried twice, unsuccessfully, to acquire the airplane. In one case, an Egyptian-
born Armenian intelligence agent known as John Thomas was caught in the act
of espionage. His punishment was death; he and several coconspirators were
hanged in an Egyptian public square.

For years, Mossad searched for a possible candidate for defection. Finally, in
early 1966, they found a man who fit the profile in Munir Redfa, a Syrian
Christian who had previously expressed feelings of persecution as a religious
minority in a squadron of Muslims. Mossad dispatched a beautiful female
intelligence agent to Baghdad on a mission. The agent worked the romance
angle first, luring Redfa to Paris with the promise of sex. There, she told Redfa
the truth about what she was after. In return for an Iraqi air force MiG, Redfa
would be paid a million dollars and given a new identity and a safe haven for
himself and his family. Redfa agreed.

With an MiG now in their possession, the Israelis set to work understanding
the strengths and weaknesses of the aircraft in flight. If it ever came to war, the
Israelis would be uniquely prepared for air combat. Which is exactly what
happened in June of 1967. What Israel learned from Munir Redfa’s MiG
ultimately allowed them to overpower the combined air forces of Syria, Egypt,
and Jordan during the Six-Day War.

Back in Washington, CIA chief Richard Helms was briefed on Redfa’s story
by James Jesus Angleton . the man running the CIA station in Tel Aviv. Angleton
was a Harvard- and Yale-educated intelligence officer who had been in the
espionage business for twenty-five years. Angleton, who died in 1987, remains
one of the Agency’s most enigmatic and bellicose spies . He is famous within the
Agency for many things, among them his idea that the Soviet propaganda
machine worked 24-7 to create an ever-widening “wilderness of mirrors.” This

wilderness, Angleton said, was the product of a myriad of KGB deceptions and
stratagems that would one day ensnare, confuse, and overpower the West.
Angleton believed that the Soviets could manipulate the CIA into believing false
information was true and true information was false. The CIA’s inability to
discern the truth inside a forest of Soviet disinformation would be America’s
downfall, Angleton said.

James Jesus Angleton allegedly had as many enemies inside the Agency as
inside the KGB, but Richard Helms trusted him. Helms and Angleton had known
each other since World War II, when they worked in the OSS counterintelligence
unit. X-2 . In the 1960s, in addition to acting as the liaison between the CIA and
the FBI, Angleton controlled the Israeli “account,” which meant he provided
Helms with almost everything Helms knew about Israel.

During the course of negotiating the deal to get the MiG, the details of which
remain classified, Angleton acquired additional information regarding Israel that
he provided to Helms, and that Helms provided to the president. This included
seemingly prophetic information about the Six-Day War before the Six-Day War
began. The Israelis had been telling the State Department that they were in great
danger from their Middle East neighbors when really, Helms explained to the
president, Israel had the tactical advantage. Israel was playing the weak card in
the hope of winning American military support. Helms also said that he’d
recently met with a senior Israeli official whose visit he saw as “a clear portent
that war might come at any time.” Coupled with Angleton’s assessment, Helms
said this meant most likely in a matter of days. When Israel launched an attack
three days later, Helms’s status with President Johnson went through the roof.
“The subsequent accuracy of this prediction established Helms’s reputation in
the Johnson White House,” wrote a CIA historian.

The story of Redfa’s defection made international headlines when it
happened, in 1966. But what didn’t make the news was what happened once
Israel finished with the MiG: the Soviet-made fighter was shipped to Area 51.
Colonel Slater, who was commander of Area 51 at the time, remembers how “it
arrived in the middle of the night, hidden inside a C-130 [cargo plane], hand-
delivered by Israeli intelligence agents.” What had been a major coup for Israel
was now an equally huge break for the United States. To the Israelis, the MiG
was the most dangerous fighter in the Arab world. To the Americans, this was
the deadly little aircraft that had been shooting down so many American fighter
pilots over Vietnam. The Russians had been supplying the North Vietnamese
with MiG-21 aircraft and MiG pilot training as well. Now, with an MiG at Area

51, Agency engineers once again had high-value foreign technology in their
hands. “We could finally learn how to beat the MiG in air-to-air combat,”
Colonel Slater explains.

The path to Area 51 is different for everyone. For T. D. Barnes it began in 1962
when the CIA wanted him to go to Vietnam to be an “adviser” there. Barnes was
just back from Bamburg, Germany, where he’d been deployed during the Berlin
Wall crisis, tasked with running Hawk missile sites along the border with
Czechoslovakia. It had been two years since he’d worked on the CIA’s Project
Palladium out of Fort Bliss.

“I said I’d go work for the Agency. But I had this dream of becoming an
Army officer, which meant going through officer training school first. The
Agency and the Army agreed and sent me to officer school.” There, during
survival training Barnes ripped open his knees and got a rare blood disease. “It
just about nearly killed me. I was never going to do combat. I’m lucky I didn’t
die,” says Barnes. He recovered but because of the blood disability, he couldn’t
go to Vietnam for the CIA. This also meant that after ten years of service, his
military career was over. Barnes and his wife, Doris, moved home to Oklahoma
and bought a house there with a yard for their two little girls, and one day when
Doris was reading the classified section of the local newspaper, she found an
advertisement of interest. “A contractor called Unitech was looking for telemetry
and radar specialists that could work on a project involving space,” Barnes
recalls.

Barnes figured Unitech was harvesting resumes. “Getting a list of people who
might be qualified to work on a highly specialized kind of a project if a contract
were to materialize with, say, NASA down the road.” Barnes told Doris it wasn’t
worth the phone call. Doris said to call anyway. “Within two days our house was
on the market, we were packed up, and we were traveling to this little one-horse
town in the Mojave Desert called Beatty.” Beatty, Nevada. Population
somewhere around 426, depending on who wants to know.

In 1964, Beatty. Nevada, was one strange town . Situated 120 miles northwest of
Las Vegas, it lay on a strip of land between Death Valley and Nevada’s atomic
bomb range. Beatty had one sheriff—he was eighty years old, was a great shot
with a rifle, and was missing most of his teeth. Beatty also had nine gas stations,
eleven churches, an airstrip, and a whorehouse called the Vicky Star Ranch.

Behind the facade, Beatty housed a collection of three- and four-letter federal
agencies, many of which were working different angles on various overt and
covert operations there. “Nobody knew what anybody else in Beatty was really
doing there and since you didn’t have a need-to-know you didn’t ask,” recalls
Barnes. Forty-five years later he still hadn’t “figured out what the service
stations or the churches were a cover for.”

How Beatty worked and who was running whom left much to the
imagination. “When Doris and I drove into town that first day,” Barnes recalls,
“we pulled up to the service station to get some gas. One of the town characters,
a semi-homeless person everyone called Panamint Annie, walked up to us and
leaned against our car. She looked at me—it was summer—and she said, ‘Well,
it’s hotter than Hell’s hubs, now isn’t it, Barnes?’ I thought, How the hell does
she know my last name?” Technically, Barnes had been recruited by Unitech. It
turned out they had a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, or NASA, after all. “But there were lots of other agencies in
Beatty who were working in the dark,” Barnes says. “Unitech was the sign on
the door.”

America’s space agency set up shop in Beatty in the mid-1960s in order to
develop programs that would help get man to the moon. But before NASA
landed on Earth’s nearest celestial body, they had to conquer space, and to do so,
they needed help from the U.S. Air Force. And before NASA conquered space,
they had to get to the edge of space, which was why Barnes was in Beatty. He
was hired to work on NASA’s X-15 rocket plane, a prototype research vehicle
that looked and acted more like a missile with wings than an airplane. Each day,
Barnes got picked up for work by a NASA employee named Bill Houck, who
drove a federal van around town and made a total of ten stops to retrieve all the
members of the secret team. They would drive out to the edge of town and begin
the short trek to the top of a chaparral-covered mountain where one hangar that
was roughly the size of a tennis court, three trailers, and a number of radar
dishes made up the NASA high-range tracking station at Beatty. Day after day,
the ten-man crew of electronics and radar wizards manned state-of-the-art
electronic systems, tracking the X-15 as it raced across the skies above the
Mojave, from the Dryden Flight Research Center in California up toward the
edge of space. Once, the airplane was forced to make an emergency landing on a
dry lake bed not far from Beatty. There was a rule prohibiting transport trucks to
haul cargo through Death Valley after dark on weekends, which meant the X-15
rocket had to spend the night in Barnes’s driveway. His daughters, ages five and

eight, spent the weekend running circles around the James Bond-looking rocket
ship parked out front cheering “Daddy’s spaceship!” No one else in Beatty said a
thing.

To get into the air, the X-15 was jettisoned off a B-52 mother ship, after
which its rocket engine would launch it into the atmosphere like a missile until it
reached the edge of space. Touching the tip of space, the X-15 would then turn
around and “fly” home, getting up to speeds of Mach 6. That kind of speed made
for an incredibly bumpy ride. In a matter of months, Barnes became a
hypersonic-flight-support expert. He monitored many things, including
telemetry, and was always amazed watching how each of the pilots responded
differently to physical stress. “We knew more about what was going on with the
pilots’ bodies than the pilots knew themselves. From Beatty, we monitored
everything. Their heart rates, their pulse, and also everything going on with the
pilot and the plane.” In case of an accident, NASA had emergency crews set up
across California, Nevada, and Utah on various dry lake beds where the X-15
could land if need be . One of those lake beds was Groom Lake. Barnes says,
“From watching my radars, I knew something was going on over there at
Groom. I could see things on my radar I wasn’t supposed to see. One of those
‘things’ went really, really fast. Later, when I was briefed on Oxcart, I figured
out what I had been watching. But at the time, I didn’t have a need-to-know so I
didn’t say anything about what I saw at Groom Lake and nobody asked.”

The X-15 was an exciting and fast-paced project to work on, with
groundbreaking missions happening twice a week. As it was with so many of the
early projects involving high-speed and high-altitude flight, many different
agencies were involved in the program, not just NASA. The Air Force funded a
large part of the program. The CIA didn’t care about space travel but they were
very interested in the ram-jet technology on the X-15, something they had
wanted to use on their own D-21 drone. “Everyone monitored each other,
technology-wise,” Barnes says. To keep the various parties in the loop, there was
a designated radio network set up for everyone involved in the project. “There
were people from Vandenberg Air Force Base, White Sands Missile Range,
Dryden, and CIA monitoring what was going on all day long.”

Even though he was only twenty-seven years old, Barnes was the most senior
radar specialist in Beatty. And almost immediately he noticed there seemed to be
a major problem with the radar. “We tracked the X-15 with radar stations at
Edwards, in California, and at Ely, in Nevada. My radar in Beatty was fine but I
noticed there was a problem at Edwards and Ely. When the X-15 was parked on

the tarmac at either place, the radars there read that it was at an altitude of two
thousand feet instead of being on the ground.”

Barnes got on the radio channel and told mission control at the Dryden Flight
Research Center about the problem. Dryden blamed it on the radar at Beatty,
even though Barnes’s radar agreed with the airplane’s. Over the radio network,
Barnes argued his point. The site manager in Beatty was horrified that Barnes
dared to challenge his superiors and shot Barnes a dirty look. Back down, he
mouthed silently. Barnes complied. But just a few weeks later, when he learned
that the X-15 was going through a fitting and there weren’t going to be any
flights for three weeks, Barnes seized the moment. “Now would be a good time
to fix your radar problem,” Barnes said into the radio network. There were
dozens of senior officials listening in. “There was silence on the channel,”

Barnes remembers. “My site manager whirled around on his chair and glared at
me. 'You’re on your own, Barnes,’ he said. Another one of the other guys, Bill
Houck, leaned over to my station, gave me a big old grin and a thumbs-up. But
Dryden still wouldn’t listen to me. They said the problem was inherent to the
radar. That it couldn’t be fixed.”

By now, Barnes had gotten friendly with the X-15 pilots. Even though they
had never met in person, a great rapport had developed between them;
understandable, given how much time they spent communicating on headset
during flights. Barnes cared about the pilots’ safety more than he cared about
what his site manager perceived to be insubordination on his part. So Barnes told
Dryden exactly what he believed was true. “I’ve been in radar long enough to
know there’s no such thing as an inherent problem in radar,” Barnes said. “I
agree with the airplane. If you don’t fix your radar, you’re gonna kill one of the
pilots one of these days.”

There was a deathly silence on the network. Back at Dryden, the
communication had been overheard by the pilots who were in the pilots’ lounge.
X-15 pilot “Joe Walker got on a headset and said, 'Effective immediately, there
will be no X-15 flights until the radar problem is fixed.’” Now Dryden had no
choice but to get on it. First, they flew up to the Beatty tracking station in a T-33,
where they flew calibration flights to compare radar data with the airplane’s
altimeter. At Ely, they did the same thing. Barnes was right. The radar at Beatty
was correct. Though both agreed with their data, the Dryden Flight Research
Center and the Ely tracking station were off by two thousand feet. The radars
were torn down and reassembled, to no avail. It was finally discovered that they
were vintage radars, left over from World War II, and they had never been

retrofitted with the field modification the way the radar at Beatty had. Unitech
got a huge Christmas bonus, and no one got killed.

Of major significance for Barnes was that somewhere off in the black
operations ether a man named John Grace had been listening as the whole
scenario went down. John Grace worked for the CIA, and Barnes’s name rang a
bell. Grace asked his staff to look into this Barnes character, the man whose
unique confidence in radar had wound up saving the day. Grace wanted to get
Barnes hired for a project that would be coming to Groom Lake—something that
even Barnes had been in the dark on back then.

Working at Beatty meant running multiple jobs, and there was a second aircraft
Barnes was in charge of tracking—the XB-70. This experimental program was
all that remained of General LeMay’s once-beloved B-70 bomber now that it had
been canceled by Congress, despite four billion dollars invested. The X in front
of B-70 indicated that the bomber was now an experimental test bed for
supersonic transport. It was a behemoth of an airplane, the fastest-flying six-
engined aircraft in the world. On June 8, 1966, the mission for the day was a
photo op with the XB-70 as the centerpiece. An F-4, an F-5, a T-38, and an F-
104 would fly in formation alongside. Barnes was in charge of monitoring
telemetry, radar, and communications from the Beatty tracking station. “General
Electrics had built the engines on all six airplanes flying that day,” Barnes says.
“They wanted a photograph of all their aircraft flying in a tight formation for the
cover of their shareholders’ meeting manual that year.”

It was a clear day, with very little natural turbulence in the air. The six aircraft
took off from Dryden and headed west. About thirty minutes later, the pilots
began getting into formation over the Mojave Desert. Barnes was monitoring
data and listening on headphones. Using his personal Fischer recording system,
Barnes was also taping the pilot transmissions. For this particular photo op, the
X-15 pilot, Joe Walker, whom Barnes had gotten to know well, was flying in the
F-104. Walker was on the right wing of the aircraft and was trying to hold his
position when turbulence by the XB-70’s six engines made him uncomfortable.
“Walker came on the radio and spoke very clearly,” Barnes recalls. “He said,

T’m opposing this mission. It is too turbulent and it has no scientific value.’”

Only a few seconds later, a catastrophic midair collision occurred . “We heard
the pilots screaming, ‘Midair! Midair! And I realized at first the XB-70 didn’t
know it had been hit,” Barnes remembers. Joe Walker’s F-104 had slammed into

the much larger airplane, caught fire, and exploded. On the XB-70, both vertical
stabilizers had been shorn off, and the airplane began to crash. Continuing to
pick up speed, the XB-70 whirled uncontrollably into a flat spin. As it headed
toward the ground, parts of the aircraft tore loose. One of the XB-70 pilots, A1
White, ejected. The other, Major Carl Cross, was trapped inside the airplane as it
slammed into the desert floor. There, just a few miles from Barstow, California,
it exploded into flames.

“It was so damn senseless,” Barnes says. “A damn photograph.” The worst
was yet to come. “A lot of people blamed Joe Walker. Easy, because he was
dead. There was, of course, the tape of him saying he was opposing the mission.
That the vortex on the damn XB-70 was sucking him in. Bill Houck, the NASA
monitor at our station, asked me to give him the tape recording to send to
Dryden. Once NASA got a hold of it,” Barnes says, “someone there quietly
disposed of it.”

The XB-70 tragedy more or less closed down the program, and the X-15
rocket plane program was finishing up as well. For Barnes, life in Beatty was
nearing an end, but one afternoon, Barnes received a phone call. A man
identifying himself as John Grace wanted to know if he’d like to come work on
an “interesting project” not far away. “Grace said it would be a commute from
Las Vegas,” Barnes says. Grace told Barnes he would have to get a top secret
clearance first. Whatever it was, it sounded exciting. Barnes told Grace, “Sign
me up.” T. D. Barnes was officially on his way to Groom Lake.

In March of 1968, his top secret clearance finally in place, Barnes learned his
new employer was going to be EG&G. He was instructed by a “handler” to
arrive at a remote, unmarked hangar at McCarran Airport for his first day at
work. There, Barnes was met by a man who shook his hand and escorted him
into a small Constellation airplane. “They didn’t say anything to me about where
we were going and I knew enough about black operations not to ask. It was a
nice, quiet ride in the airplane. Just before we landed at Area 51,1 heard the pilot
say to the copilot, They’ve got the doughnut out.’ Then the pilots quickly closed
all the curtains on the airplane so when we landed I couldn’t see a thing. I
wondered what the doughnut was. I didn’t ask. I was taken to the EG&G Special
Projects building and introduced to our group. The boss said, 'What’s your first
name?’ I said, ‘T.D.’ He said, 'Not anymore. You’re Thunder out here.’” Later
that first day, Barnes was taken inside one of the hangars at Area 51. “They
opened the door. There sat a Russian MiG. They said, ‘This here’s the doughnut.’
I got a chuckle about that. The pilots who’d brought me to the area had no idea

that the whole reason I’d been brought in was because of the doughnut.”

Munir Redfa’s MiG had been nicknamed the doughnut because the jet
fighter’s nose had a round opening in it, like a doughnut’s. It was the first
advanced Soviet fighter jet ever to set its wheels down on U.S. soil. Colonel
Slater, overseeing Black Shield in Kadena at the time, remembers getting a call
in the middle of the night from one of his staff, Jim Simon. “Simon called me up
all excited and said, 'Slater, you are not going to believe this!’ He told me about
the MiG. How it landed at [Area] 51 in the middle of the night, hidden inside a
cargo plane. How it was accompanied by someone from a foreign government.
Simon couldn’t get over it and I couldn’t wait to see it,” Slater remembers.

Oxcart pilot Frank Murray remembers the excitement of seeing it as well.

During Operation Black Shield Murray was on rotation between Area 51 and
Kadena when he was taken into the secret hangar to have a look at the MiG. “It
was a tiny little sucker, considering how deadly it was,” Murray says. “We
couldn’t believe we had a captured one up there at the Ranch.”

T. D. Barnes and the EG&G Special Projects Group at Area 51 got to work
reverse engineering Colonel Redfa’s MiG —taking it apart and putting it back
together again. All the engineers knew that this was the best way to really
understand how something had been built. The EG&G Special Projects Group
appeared to have advance expertise in this technical process of reverse
engineering aircraft. At the time, no one knew why, and Barnes, new to the
EG&G engineering team, knew better than to ask. He was excited to get to work.
“We broke the MiG down into each of its individual pieces. Pieces of the
cockpit, the gyros, oscillograph, fuel flow meter, radio... everything. Then we
put it back together. The MiG didn’t have computers or fancy navigation
equipment.” Still, Barnes and his crew were stumped. How was it that this
Soviet plane was beating the supposedly more capable U.S. fighters in air-to-air
engagements? No one could explain why. So a second program was conceived,
the MiG’s Have Doughnut tactical phase. During the Have Doughnut, the MiG
would begin flying tactical missions against U.S. airplanes in the skies over
Groom Lake. The Air Force said it wasn’t interested but the Navy leaped at the
chance.

“Breaking it down was the first step in understanding the aircraft. But it was
by sending the MiG flying that we really figured out how it maneuvered so damn
fast,” Barnes says. Test pilots flew a total of 102 MiG missions over Groom
Lake. Mock air battles between the MiG and American fighter jets were a daily
event for a period of six weeks during the spring of 1968. The program (not

including its Area 51 locale) was declassified by the U.S. Air Force Foreign
Technology Division in October of 1997 and by the Defense Intelligence Agency
in March of 2000. “We learned that you had to sneak right up on it and shoot it
down before it had a chance to maneuver. That was the key. Get it on the first
chance you get. There were no second chances with a MiG,” Barnes explains.
Constant flying takes a toll on any aircraft, but with a captured enemy airplane
this proved especially challenging. “Since no spare parts were available, ground
crews had to reverse engineer the components and make new ones from raw
materials,” Barnes says. “But when both phases were over, the technical and the
tactical ones, we’d unlocked the secrets of the MiG.”

There were repercussions from the Soviets. “The fact that we had a MiG at
Area 51 infuriated the Russians,” explains Barnes. “They retaliated by sending
more spy satellites overhead at Area 51, sometimes as often as every forty-five
minutes.” Up to this point, the Soviets had gotten used to monitoring the routine
activity at the base, which consisted primarily of takeoffs and landings of the
Oxcart and a few drones. But once the MiG showed up, the U.S. Air Force
Foreign Technology Division appeared on the scene too, and with them came
various models of Soviet-built radar systems captured in the Middle East. And
once the Soviets discovered engineers at Groom Lake were testing these foreign
radar systems, they again decided to monitor the situation more closely from
overhead.

The newly acquired Soviet radar systems started cropping up around the
western edges of the Groom dry lake bed and also around Slater Lake, which
was about a mile northwest of the main hangars. Technical evaluation of the
radar was quickly assigned to Barnes. He requested a Nike missile system and
was surprised at just how quickly his request was filled. “I think the CIA went
and got a Nike missile system at my old stomping ground, Fort Bliss, just about
the very next day,” Barnes says. With radars scattered all over the range,
including acquisition radar that rotated and searched for incoming targets, a geek
like Barnes had a field day. “We used the Nike to track the MiGs and other
airplanes to evaluate their ECM against X-band radar.” What Barnes did not
know was that these radar systems were being acquired for the upcoming radar
cross-section analysis of an Air Force plane in the works. The Russians had no
idea what the Air Force was dreaming up either, but they were duly angry about
the captured radars that were now sitting in the hills overlooking Groom Lake.

“We were pinned down,” says Barnes. For weeks on end, the Special Projects
Group couldn’t turn on a single radar system; the Russians were monitoring the

area that intensely. Barnes and his group passed the time by playing mind games
with the Soviets. They painted strange shapes on the tarmac, “funny-looking
impossible aircraft,” which they then heated up with portable heaters to confuse
the Soviets who were shooting infrared satellite pictures of the work going on
there. “We got a kick out of imagining what the Russians thought of our new
airplanes,” Barnes says. With all the time on their hands, Barnes and his group of
twenty-three electronics specialists began dreaming up other ways to entertain
themselves. They made up riddles. They placed bets. They played with mixed
chemicals that made their tennis sneakers glow in the dark. They rewired the
Special Projects motor pool car so it would give the first guy to drive it a series
of low-voltage shocks. They rigged up a tall TV antenna on top of their living
quarters, hoping to draw reception from Las Vegas. Instead, they tapped into an
international channel broadcast out of Spain. “For many months, all we watched
were bullfights in Madrid,” Barnes recalls.

This was a group of highly trained specialists gathered to pioneer radar
technology, so when they finally ran out of practical jokes and bullfights, their
attention turned back to problem solving. They started to occupy themselves by
examining minutiae on printouts from radar returns. In a serendipitous way, this
led to a technological breakthrough at Groom Lake. The EG&G Special Projects
Group figured out they could identify specific types of aircraft by the tiniest
nuances in the patterns their radar signatures left on various radar systems. This
was made possible by the group’s unusual advantage of having two things at
their disposal: several bands of radar, which allowed them to compare results,
and an entire fleet of military aircraft, which were to be used in the tactical phase
of the exploitation of the MiG.

What would normally have been a technical endeavor to determine electronic
countermeasures against enemy aircraft became a major breakthrough in the
further development of stealth technology. From studying the minutiae, Barnes
and his fellow radar experts identified what the enemy could and could not see
on their radars back home. This information would eventually be shared with
Lockheed during radar testing at Area 51, as Lockheed further developed stealth.
Technology was doing for humans what humans had forever been trying to do
for themselves; to spy on the enemy means to learn as much about him as he
knows about himself. That was the technical breakthrough. There was a tactical
breakthrough as well. The ultrasecret MiG program at Area 51 gave birth to the
Top Gun fighter-pilot school , a fact that would remain secret for decades.
Officially called the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School, the program

was established a year after the first MiG arrived, in March of 1969, and based
out of Miramar, California. Instructor pilots who had fought mock air battles
over Groom Lake against Munir Redfa’s MiG began training Navy pilots for
sorties against Russian MiGs over Vietnam. When these Top Gun-trained Navy
pilots resumed flying in Southeast Asia, the results were radically different than
the deadly nine-to-one ratio from before. The scales had tipped . Now, American
pilots would begin shooting down North Vietnamese pilots at a ratio of thirteen
to one. The captured Soviet-made MiG-21 Fishbed proved to be an aerial
warfare coup for the United States. And what followed was a quid pro quo. To
thank the Israelis for supplying the United States with the most prized and
unknowable aircraft in the arsenal of its archnemesis, America began to supply
Israel with jet fighters to assist Israel in keeping its rivals at bay.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Meltdown

The idea behind a facility like Area 51 is that dangerous top secret tests can be
conducted there without much scrutiny or oversight. To this end, there is no
shortage of death woven into the uncensored history of Area 51. One of the most
dangerous tests ever performed there was Project 57, the dirty bomb test that
took place five miles northwest of Groom Lake, in a subparcel called Area 13.
And yet what might have been the one defensible, positive outcome in this
otherwise shockingly outrageous test—namely, lessons gleaned from its cleanup
—was ignored until it was too late.

Unlike the spy plane projects at Groom Lake, where operations tend to have
clear-cut beginnings and ceremonious endings, Project 57 was abandoned
midstream. If the point of setting off a dirty bomb in secret was to see what
would happen if an airplane carrying a nuclear bomb crashed into the earth near
where people lived, it follows that serious efforts would then be undertaken by
the Atomic Energy Commission to learn how to clean up such a nightmare
scenario after the catastrophe occurs. No such efforts were initially made.

Instead, about a year after setting off the dirty bomb, the Atomic Energy
Commission put a barbed-wire fence around the Area 51 subparcel, marked it
with hazard/do not enter/nuclear material signs, and moved on to the next
weapons test. The bustling CIA facility five miles downwind would be relatively
safe, the nuclear scientists and the weapons planners surmised. Alpha particles
are heavy and would rest on the topsoil after the original dust cloud settled
down. Furthermore, almost no one knew about the supersecret project, certainly
not the public, so who would protest? The closest inhabitants were the rank and
file at the CIA’s Groom Lake facility next door, and they also knew nothing of

Project 57. The men there followed strict need-to-know protocols, and as far as
the commission was concerned, all anyone at Area 51 needed to know was to not
venture near the barbed-wire fence marking off Area 13.

And yet the information gleaned from a cleanup effort would have been
terribly useful, as was revealed eight years and eight months after Project 57
unfurled. On the morning of January 17, 1966, a real-life dirty bomb crisis
occurred over Palomares, Spain. A Strategic Air Command bomber flying with
four armed hydrogen bombs —with yields between 70 kilotons and 1.45
megatons—collided midair with a refueling tanker over the Spanish countryside.

On the morning of the accident, an Air Force pilot and his six-man crew were
participating in an exercise that was part of Operation Chrome Dome, something
that had begun in the late 1950s as part of Strategic Air Command. In a show of
force inherent to the military doctrine of the day—something called mutual
assured destruction, or MAD—airplanes regularly circled Earth carrying
thermonuclear bombs. The idea behind MAD was that if the Soviet Union were
to make a sneak attack on America, SAC bombers would already be airborne to
strike back at Moscow with nuclear weapons of their own, thereby assuring the
mutual destruction of both sides.

That morning, the bomber lined up with the tanker and had just begun
refueling when, in the words of pilot Larry Messinger, “ all of a sudden, all hell
seemed to break loose” and the two aircraft collided. There was a massive
explosion and the men in the fuel tanker were instantly incinerated. Somehow
Messinger, his copilot, the instructor pilot, and the navigator managed to eject
from the airplane carrying the bombs. Their parachutes deployed, and the men
floated down, landing in the sea. The four nuclear bombs—individually
powerful enough to destroy Manhattan—also had parachutes, two of which did
not deploy. One parachuted bomb landed gently in a dry riverbed and was later
recovered relatively intact. But when the two bombs without parachutes hit the
earth, their explosive charges detonated, breaking open the nuclear cores.

Nuclear material was released at Palomares in the form of aerosolized
plutonium , which then spread out across 650 acres of Spanish farmland—
consistent with dispersal patterns from the Project 57 dirty bomb test. The fourth
bomb landed in the sea and became lost. Palomares was then a small fishing
village and farming community located on the Mediterranean Sea. As fortune
would have it, January 17 was the Festival of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of
Palomares, which meant most people in the village were at church that day and
not out working in the fields.

Five thousand miles away, in Washington, DC, President Johnson learned of
the disaster over breakfast. He’d been sitting in his bedroom sipping tea and
eating melon and chipped beef when a staffer from the White House Situation
Room knocked, entered, and set down a copy of his daily security briefing. On
the first page, the president read about the war in Vietnam. On the second page
he learned about the Palomares incident. The daily brief said nothing about
widespread plutonium dispersal or about the lost thermonuclear bomb. Only that
the “16th Nuclear Disaster Team had been dispatched to the area.” The “16th
Nuclear Disaster Team” sounded official enough, but if fifteen nuclear disaster
teams had preceded this one or existed concurrently, no record of any of them
exists in the searchable Department of Energy archives. In reality, the group was
ad hoc, meaning it was put together for the specific purpose of dealing with the
Palomares incident. An official nuclear disaster response team did not exist in
1966 and would not be created for another nine years, until 1975, when retired
Brigadier General Mahlon E. Gates, then the manager of the Nevada Test Site,
put together the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST.

In 1966, the conditions in Palomares, Spain, were strikingly similar to the
conditions at the Nevada Test Site in terms of geology. Both were dry, hilly
landscapes with soil, sand, and wind shear as significant factors to deal with. But
considering, with inconceivable lack of foresight, the Atomic Energy
Commission had never attempted to clean up the dirty bomb that it had set off at
Area 13 nine years before, the 16th Nuclear Disaster Team was, essentially,
working in the dark.

Eight hundred individuals with no hands-on expertise were sent to Palomares
to assist in the cleanup efforts there. The teams improvised. One group secured
the contaminated area and prepared the land to remove contaminated soil. A
second group worked to locate the lost thermonuclear bomb, called a broken
arrow in Defense Department terms. The group cleaning up the dispersed
plutonium included “specialists and scientists” from the Los Alamos Laboratory,
the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Sandia Laboratories, Raytheon, and EG&G.
It was terribly ironic. The very same companies who had engineered the nuclear
weapons and whose employees had wired, armed, and fired them were now the
companies being paid to clean up the deadly mess. This was the military-
industrial complex in full swing.

For the next three months, workers labored around the clock to
decontaminate the site of deadly plutonium. By the time the cleanup was over,
more than fourteen hundred tons of radioactive soil and plant life were excavated

and shipped to the Savannah River plant in South Carolina for disposal. The
majority of the plutonium dispersed on the ground was accounted for, but the
Defense Nuclear Agency eventually conceded that the extent of the plutonium
particles scattered by wind, carried as dust, and ingested by earthworms and
excreted somewhere else “will never be known.” As for the missing hydrogen
bomb, for forty-four days the Pentagon refused to admit it was lost despite the
fact that it was widely reported as being missing. “I don’t know of any missing
bomb.” one Pentagon official told the Associated Press. Only after the bomb was
recovered from the ocean floor did the Pentagon admit that it had in fact been
lost.

The nuclear accidents did not stop there. Two years and four days later there
was another airplane crash involving a Strategic Air Command bomber and four
nuclear bombs. On January 21, 1968, an uncontrollable fire started on board a B-
52G bomber during a secret mission over Greenland . Six of the seven crew
members bailed out of the burning airplane, which crested over the rooftops of
the American air base at Thule and slammed into the frozen surface of North
Star Bay. The impact detonated the high explosives in at least three of the four
thermonuclear bombs—similar to exploding multiple dirty bombs—spreading
radioactive plutonium, uranium, and tritium over a large swath of ice. A second
fire started at the crash site , consuming bomb debris, wreckage from the
airplane, and fuel. After the inferno burned for twenty minutes the ice began to
melt. One of the bombs fell into the bay and disappeared beneath the frozen sea.
In November of 2008, a BBC News investigation found that the Pentagon
ultimately abandoned that fourth nuclear weapon after it became lost.

Once again, an ad hoc emergency group was put together; there was still no
permanent disaster cleanup group. This time five hundred people were involved.
The conditions were almost as dangerous as the nuclear material. Temperatures
fell to -70 degrees Fahrenheit, and winds blew at ninety miles per hour.
Equipment froze. In a secret SAC document, made public by a Freedom of
Information Act request in 1989, the Air Force declared their efforts would be
nominal, “a cleanup undertaken as good housekeeping measures.” with officials
anticipating the removal of radioactive debris “to equal not less than 50%” of the
total of what was there. For eight months, a crew calling themselves the Dr.
Freezelove Team worked around the clock. When they were done, 10,500 tons of
radioactive ice, snow, and crash debris was airlifted out of Greenland and flown
to South Carolina for disposal.

Back at the Nevada Test Site, a new industry had been born in nuclear

accident cleanup. But before anything can get cleaned up, an assessment must be
made regarding how much lethal radiation is present, where exactly, and in what
form. All across the desert floor, new proof-of-concept, or prototypes, of
radiation-detection instruments appeared. Before the nuclear bomb accidents in
Spain and Greenland, individual radiation-detection machines were limited to
handheld devices like Geiger counters, used to examine workers’ hands and feet
and to search for radiation in limited local areas. Finally, gadgets and gizmos
flooded the Nevada Test Site for field-testing in a post-nuclear accident world.
After the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, testing had moved underground, but
often these underground tests “vented,” releasing huge plumes of radiation from
fissures in the earth. The test site was the perfect place to test equipment because
there was an abundance of plutonium, americium, cesium , cobalt, europium,
strontium, and tritium in the topsoil, and no shortage of radiation in the air.

First came new handheld devices, like a briefcase called the Neutron Detector
Suitcase, a prototype designed by EG&G, which was followed by more
advanced means of detecting radiation, including ground vehicles. The Sky
Scanner, developed by the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, roamed
down the test site’s dirt roads measuring radioactivity escaping from atomic
vents. The Sky Scanner looked like a news van with a satellite dish, but inside it
was full of equipment that could determine how much fallout was in the air.

Next came fixed-wing aircraft that could patrol the air over an accident site.

Used to detect fallout since Operation Crossroads, they were now equipped with
state-of-the-art, still-classified radiation-detection devices. This marked the birth
of a burgeoning new military technology that would become one of the most
important and most secret businesses of the twenty-first century. Called remote
sensing , it is the ability to recognize levels of radioactivity from a distance using
ultraviolet radiation, infrared, and other means of detection.

Within a decade of the disastrous nuclear accidents at Palomares and Thule,
EG&G would so dominate the radiation-detection market that the laboratory
built at the Nevada Test Site for this purpose was initially called the EG&G
Remote Sensing Laboratory . After 9/11, the sister laboratory, at Nellis Air Force
Base in Las Vegas, was called the Remote Sensing Laboratory and included
sensing-detection mechanisms for all types of WMD. This facility would
become absolutely critical to national security, so much so that by 2011, T. D.
Barnes says that “only two people at Nellis are cleared with a need-to-know
regarding classified briefings about the Remote Sensing Lab.” Barnes is a
member of the Nellis/Creech Air Force Base support team and its civilian

military council. But in the 1960s, three nuclear facilities—Los Alamos,
Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia—and one private corporation—EG&G—were
the organizations uniquely positioned to see the writing on the wall. If nuclear
accidents were going to continue to happen, then these four entities were going
to secure the government contracts to clean things up .

EG&G had been taking radiation measurements and tracking radioactive
clouds for the Atomic Energy Commission since 1946. For decades, EG&G
Energy Measurements has maintained control of the vast majority of radiation
measurements records going back to the first postwar test at Bikini Atoll in
1946. Because much of this information was originally created under the strict
Atomic Energy classification Secret/Restricted Data—i.e., it was “born
classified”—it has largely remained classified ever since. It cannot be transferred
to another steward. For decades, this meant there was no one to compete with
EG&G for the remote sensing job. How involved EG&G is in remote sensing
today, their corporate headquarters won’t say .

So secret are the record groups in EG&G’s archives, even the president of the
United States can be denied access to them, as President Clinton was in 1994 .
One year earlier, a reporter named Eileen Welsome had written a forty-five-page
newspaper story for the Albuquerque Tribune revealing that the Atomic Energy
Commission had secretly injected human test subjects with plutonium starting in
the 1940s without those individuals’ knowledge or consent. When President
Clinton learned about this, he created an advisory committee on human radiation
experiments to look into secrets kept by the Atomic Energy Commission and to
make them public. In several areas, the president’s committee succeeded in
revealing disturbing tmths, but in other areas it failed. In at least one case,
regarding a secret project at Area 51, the committee was denied access to records
kept by EG&G and the Atomic Energy Commission on the grounds that the
president did not have a need-to-know about them. In another case, regarding the
nuclear rocket program at Area 25 in Jackass Flats, the president’s committee
also failed to inform the public of the tmth. Whether this is because the record
group in EG&G’s archive was kept from the committee or because the
committee had access to it but chose not to report the facts in earnest remains
unknown. Instead, what happened at Jackass Flats, well after atmospheric testing
had been outlawed around the world, gets a one-line reference in the Advisory
Committee’s 937-page Final Report, grouped in with dozens of other tests
involving “intentional releases” near human populations. “At AEC sites in
Nevada and Idaho, radioactive materials were released in tests of the safety of

bombs, nuclear reactors, and proposed nuclear rockets and airplanes,” the report
innocuously reads.

If Area 51 had a doppelganger next door at the test site, it would certainly be
Area 25, which encompasses 223 square miles. The flat, sandy desert expanse
got its name during the gold rush when miners used to tie their donkeys to trees
in the flat area while searching the surrounding mountains for gold. Like Area
51, Jackass Flats is surrounded by mountain ranges on three of its four sides,
making them both hidden sites within federally restricted land. Unlike Area 51,
which technically does not exist, Jackass Flats in the 1950s and 1960s
maintained a polished public face. When President Kennedy visited the Nevada
Test Site in 1962, he went to Jackass Flats to promote the space travel programs
that were going on there. Richard Mingus was one of the security guards
assigned to assist the president’s Secret Service detail that day. Photographs that
appeared in the newspapers showed the handsome president, wearing his
signature sunglasses and dark suit, flanked by aides while admiring strange-
looking contraptions rising up from the desert floor; Mingus stands at attention
nearby. Next to the president is Glenn Seaborg, then head of the Atomic Energy
Commission and the man who co-discovered plutonium. But as with most
nuclear projects of the day, the public was only told a fraction of the story. There
was a lot more going on at Jackass Flats behind the scenes—and in underground
facilities there—about which the public had no idea.

Area 25 began as the perfect place for America to launch a nuclear-powered
spaceship that would get man to Mars and back in the astonishingly short time of
124 days. The spaceship was going to be enormous, sixteen stories tall and
piloted by one hundred and fifty men . Project Orion seemed like a space vehicle
from a science fiction novel, except it was real. It was the brainchild of a former
Los Alamos weapons designer named Theodore Taylor, a man who saw space as
the last “new frontier.”

For years, beginning in the early 1950s, Taylor designed nuclear bombs for
the Pentagon until he began to doubt the motives of the Defense Department. He
left government service, at least officially, and joined General Atomics in San
Diego, the nuclear division of defense contractor General Electric. There, he
began designing nuclear-powered spaceships. But to build a spaceship that could
get to Mars required federal funding, and in 1958 General Atomics presented the
idea to President Eisenhower’s new science and technology research group, the

Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. The agency had been created as
a result of the Sputnik crisis, its purpose being to never let the Russians one-up
American scientists again. Today, the agency is known as DARPA. The D stands
for defense.

At the time, developing cutting-edge space-flight technology meant hiring
scientists like Wernher Von Braun to design chemical-based rockets that could
conceivably get man to the moon in a capsule the size of a car. Along came Ted
Taylor with a proposal to build a Mars-bound spaceship the size of an office
building, thanks to nuclear energy. For ARPA chief Roy Johnson, Ted Taylor’s
conception was love at first sight. “ Everyone seems to be making plans to pile
fuel on fuel on fuel to put a pea into orbit, but you seem to mean business,” the
ARPA chief told Taylor in 1958.

General Atomics was given a one-million-dollar advance, a classified project
with a code name of Orion, and a maximum-security test facility in Area 25 of
the Nevada Test Site at Jackass Flats. The reason Taylor’s spaceship needed an
ultrasecret hiding place and could not be launched from Cape Canaveral, as
other rockets and spaceships in the works could be, was that the Orion spacecraft
would be powered by two thousand “small-sized” nuclear bombs. Taylor’s
original idea was to dispense these bombs from the rear of the spaceship, the
same as a Coke machine dispenses sodas. The bombs would fall out behind the
spaceship, literally exploding and pushing the spaceship along. The Coca-Cola
Company was even hired to do a classified early design.

At Area 25, far away from public view, Taylor’s giant spaceship would
launch from eight 250-foot-tall towers. Blastoff would mean Orion would rise
out of a column of nuclear energy released by exploding atomic bombs. “It
would have been the most sensational thing anyone ever saw.” Taylor told his
biographer John McPhee. But when the Air Force took over the project, they had
an entirely different vision in mind. ARPA and the Air Force reconfigured Orion
into a space-based battleship. From high above Earth, a USS Orion could be
used to launch attacks against enemy targets using nuclear missiles. Thanks to
Orion’s nuclear-propulsion technology, the spaceship could make extremely fast
defensive maneuvers, avoiding any Russian nuclear missiles that might come its
way. It would be able to withstand the blast from a one-megaton bomb from only
five hundred feet away.

For a period of time in the early 1960s the Air Force believed Orion was
going to be invincible. “Whoever builds Orion will control the Earth!” declared
General Thomas S. Power of the Strategic Air Command. But no one built

Orion. After atmospheric nuclear tests were banned in 1963, the project was
indefinitely suspended. Still wanting to get men to Mars, NASA and the Air
Force turned their attention to nuclear-powered rockets. From now on, there
would be no nuclear explosions in the atmosphere at Jackass Flats—at least not
officially. Instead, the nuclear energy required for the Mars spaceship would be
contained in a flying reactor, with fuel rods producing nuclear energy behind
barriers that were lightweight enough for space travel but not so thin as to cook
the astronauts inside. The project was now called NERVA, which stood for
Nuclear Engine Rocket Vehicle Application. The facility had a public name,
even though no one from the public could go there. It was called the Nuclear
Rocket Test Facility at Jackass Flats. A joint NASA/Atomic Energy Commission
office was created to manage the program, called the Space Nuclear Propulsion
Office, or SNPO .

For T. D. Barnes, working on the NERVA nuclear reactor was a bit of a
stretch—his area of expertise was missile and radar technologies. But when
things got slow over at Area 51 in the late 1960s, Barnes, a member of EG&G
Special Projects team, would be dispatched over to Area 25 to work on the
NERVA program. Even though NERVA had been sold to Congress as a public
program, all its data was classified, as were the day-to-day goings-on in Area 25.
Barnes’s workstation could not have been more hidden from the public. It was
underground, built into the side of a mountain that rose up from the flat desert
landscape. Each morning Barnes and his fellow Q-cleared coworkers who lived
in and around Las Vegas parked in employee parking lots down at the entrance
to the Nevada Test Site, at Camp Mercury, and were then shuttled out to Jackass
Flats in Atomic Energy Commission motor pool vans. “Some of the people
working on NERVA lived in Beatty and Amargosa Valley and drove to the tunnel
themselves,” Barnes adds.

All NERVA employees entered work through a small portal in the side of the
mountain, “shaped like the entrance to an old mining shaft, but spiffed up a bit,”
Barnes recalls, remembering “large steel doors and huge air pipes curving down
from the mesas and entering the tunnel.” Inside, the concrete tunnel was long
and straight and ran into the earth “as far as the eye could see.” Atomic Energy
Commission records indicate the underground tunnel was 1.150 feet long.

Barnes remembered it being brightly lit and sparkling clean. “There were
exposed air duct pipes running the length of the tunnel as well as several layers
of metal cable trays, which were used to transport heavy items into and out of
the tunnel,” he says. “The ceiling was about eight feet tall, and men walked

through it no more than two abreast.” There was also a tarantula problem at
Jackass Flats, which meant every now and then, Barnes and his colleagues
would spot a large hairy spider running down the tunnel floors or scampering
along its walls.

Deep in the tunnel Barnes would come up against a last set of closed doors.
When they opened, they revealed a succession of brightly lit rooms filled with
desks. Barnes explains, “Moving closer to ground zero where the tunnel ended,
we entered a large subterranean room stacked floor to ceiling with rows of
electronic amplifiers, discriminator circuits, and multiplexing components and
banks of high-tech equipment lining the walls.” Standing in front of the row of
electronics was an engineer “usually with a cart full of electronic test equipment
calibrating and repairing electronic circuits,” Barnes explains. These workers
were all preparing for what was actually going on aboveground, and that was
full-power, full-scale nuclear reactor engine tests. In order for NASA and the
Atomic Energy Commission to be able to verify that NERVA could actually
propel a spaceship filled with astronauts the 34 million to 249 million miles to
Mars (the distance depends on the positions of the two planets in their orbits),
those federal agencies had to witness NERVA running full power for long
periods of time here on Earth first. To test that kind of thrust without having the
engine launch itself into space, it was caged inside a test stand and positioned
upside down.

For each engine test, a remote-controlled locomotive would bring the nuclear
reactor over to the test stand from where it was housed three miles away in its
own cement-block-and-lead-lined bunker, called E-MAD. “We used to joke that
the locomotive at Jackass Flats was the slowest in the world,” Barnes explains.
“The only thing keeping the reactor from melting down as it traveled down the
railroad back and forth between E-MAD and the test stand was the liquid
hydrogen [LHp] bath it sat in.” The train never moved at speeds more than five

miles per hour. “One spark and the whole thing could blow,” Barnes explains. At
-320 degrees Fahrenheit, liquid hydrogen is one of the most combustible and
dangerous explosives in the world. James A. Dewar, author of To the End of the
Solar System: The Story of the Nuclear Rocket, gets even more specific. “ One
hundredth of what one might receive from shuffling along a rug and then
touching a wall can ignite hydrogen,” Dewar wrote in 2004. To help visualize
what the facilities aboveground at Jackass Flats looked like, Barnes likens them
to Cape Kennedy. “Imagine a one-hundred-twenty-foot-tall aluminum tower
rising up from a plateau of cement surrounded by a deep, concrete aqueduct.

Add some huge, spherical thermos-like dewars sitting around, each containing
something like two hundred and sixty thousand gallons of liquid hydrogen, and
you can visualize the space-launch appearance of things,” Barnes explains. In
Atomic Energy photographs from the 1960s, a single set of train tracks can be
seen running along the bottom of the cement aqueduct and disappearing into an
opening underneath the tall metal tower. “The railroad car carried the nuclear
reactor up to the test stand and lifted it into place using remotely controlled
hydraulic hands,” Barnes explains. “Meanwhile, we were all underground
looking at the reactor through special leaded-glass windows, taking
measurements and recording data as the engine ran.” The reason the facility was
buried inside the mountain was not only to hide it from the Soviet satellites
spying on the U.S. nuclear rocket program from overhead, but to shield Barnes
and his fellow workers from radiation poisoning from the NERVA reactor. “Six
feet of earth shields a man from radiation poisoning pretty good,” says Barnes.

When running at full power, the nuclear engine operated at a temperature of
2.300 Kelvin , or 3,680.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which meant it also had to be kept
cooled down by the liquid hydrogen on a permanent basis. “While the engine
was running the canyon was like an inferno as the hot hydrogen simultaneously
ignited upon contact with the air,” says Barnes. These nuclear rocket engine tests
remained secret until the early 1990s, when a reporter named Lee Davidson, the
Washington bureau chief for Utah’s Deseret News, provided the public with the
first descriptive details. “The Pentagon released information after I filed a
Freedom of Information Act.” Davidson says. In turn, Davidson provided the
public with previously unknown facts: “bolted down, the engine roared...
sending skyward a plume of invisible hydrogen exhaust that had just been thrust
through a superheated uranium fission reactor,” Davidson revealed. Researching
the story, he also learned that back in the 1960s, after locals in Caliente, Nevada,
complained that iodine 131—a major radioactive hazard found in nuclear fission
products—had been discovered in their town’s water supply, Atomic Energy
officials denied any nuclear testing had been going on at the time. Instead,
officials blamed the Chinese, stating, “Fresh fission products probably came
from an open-air nuclear bomb test in China.” In fact, a NERVA engine test had
gone on at Area 25 just three days before the town conducted its water supply
test.

Had the public known about the NERVA tests when they were going on, the tests

would have been perceived as a nuclear catastrophe in the making. Which is
exactly what did happen. “Los Alamos wanted a run-awav reactor.” wrote
Dewar, who in addition to being an author is a longtime Atomic Energy
Commission employee, “a power surge until [the reactor] exploded.” Dewar
explained why. “If Los Alamos had data on the most devastating accident
possible , it could calculate other accident scenarios with confidence and take
preventative measures accordingly.” And so, on January 12, 1965, the nuclear
rocket engine code-named Kiwi was allowed to overheat. High-speed cameras
recorded the event. The temperature rose to “ over 4000°C until it burst , sending
fuel hurtling skyward and glowing every color of the rainbow,” Dewar wrote.
Deadly radioactive fuel chunks as large as 148 pounds shot up into the sky. One
ninety-eight-pound piece of radioactive fuel landed more than a quarter of a mile
away.

Once the explosion subsided, a radioactive cloud rose up from the desert
floor and “stabilized at 2,600 feet” where it was met by an EG&G aircraft
“equipped with samplers mounted on its wings.” The cloud hung in the sky and
began to drift east then west. “It blew over Los Angeles and out to sea,” Dewar
explained. The full data on the EG&G radiation measurements remains
classified.

The test, made public as a “safety test,” caused an international incident. The
Soviet Union said it violated the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which of
course it did. But the Atomic Energy Commission had what it wanted, “accurate
data from which to base calculations.” Dewar explained, adding that “the test
ended many concerns about a catastrophic incident.” In particular, the Atomic
Energy Commission and NASA both now knew that “in the event of such a
launch pad accident [the explosion] proved death would come quickly to anyone
standing 100 feet from ground zero, serious sickness and possible death at 400
feet, and an unhealthy dose at 1000 feet.”

Because it is difficult to believe that the agencies involved did not already
know this, the question remains: What data was Atomic Energy Commission
really after? The man in charge of the project during this time, Space Nuclear
Propulsion Office director Harold B. Finger, was reached for comment in 2010.
“I don’t recall that exact test.” Finger says. “It was a long time ago.”

Five months later, in June of 1965, disaster struck, this time officially
unplanned. That is when another incarnation of the nuclear rocket engine, code-
named Phoebus , had been running at full power for ten minutes when “ suddenly
it ran out of LH p [liquid hydrogen and] overheated in the blink of an eye,” wrote

Dewar. As with the planned “explosion” five months earlier, the nuclear rocket
reactor first ejected large chunks of its radioactive fuel out into the open air.

Then “the remainder fused together, as if hit by a giant welder,” Dewar
explained. Laymen would call this a meltdown. The cause of the accident was a
faulty gauge on one of the liquid hydrogen tanks. One gauge read a quarter full
when in reality there was nothing left inside the tank.

So radiated was the land at Jackass Flats after the Phoebus accident, even
HAZMAT cleanup crews in full protective gear could not enter the area for six
weeks . No information is available on how the underground employees got out.
Originally, Los Alamos tried to send robots into Jackass Flats to conduct the
decontamination, but according to Dewar the robots were “slow and inefficient.”
Eventually humans were sent in, driving truck-mounted vacuum cleaners to suck
up deadly contaminants. Declassified Atomic Energy Commission photographs
show workers in protective gear and gas masks picking up radioactive chunks
with long metal tongs . Like many Atomic Energy Commission officials, Dewar
saw the accident as “achieving some objectives.” That “while certainly
unfortunate, unplanned, unwanted and unforeseen,” he believed that “calling the
accident ‘catastrophic’ mocks the meaning of the word.” The cleanup process
took four hundred people two months to complete.

So what happened to NERVA in the end? When Barnes worked on NERVA in
1968, the project was well advanced. But space travel was on the wane. By
1970, the public’s infatuation with getting a man to Mars had made an abrupt
about-face. Funding dried up, and NASA projects began shutting down. “We did
develop the rocket,” Barnes says. “We do have the technology to send man to
Mars this way. But environmentally, we could never use a nuclear-powered
rocket on Earth in case it blew up on takeoff. So the NERVA was put to bed.”
That depends how one defines put to bed. President Nixon canceled the program,
and it officially ended on January 5. 1973 . Several employees who worked at the
NERVA facility at Jackass Flats say the nuclear rocket program came to a
dramatic, cataclysmic end, one that has never before been made public. “We
know the government likes to test accidents in advance,” Barnes says. Darwin
Morgan, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada
Site Office, says no such final test ever happened. “Something like that would
have been too huge of an event to have happened to ‘cover up,”’ Morgan says.
“I’ve talked to people in our classified repository. They don’t have anything.”

The record suggests otherwise. In studying Area 25 to determine how former
Atomic Energy Commission workers and contractors with cancer may have been

exposed to potentially lethal doses of radiation there, investigators for the
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health determined that “two
nuclear reactors” were in fact destroyed there. “ Due to the destruction of two
nuclear reactors and transport of radioactive material, the area was extensively
contaminated with enriched uranium, niobium, cobalt, and cesium,” the authors
of the report concluded in 2008.

The full data relating to the last tests conducted on the NERVA nuclear rocket
remain classified as Restricted Data and the Department of Energy has
repeatedly declined to release the documents. Atomic Energy Commission
records are “well organized and complete but unfortunately, most are classified
or kept in secure areas that limit public access,” Dewar wrote. As for the records
from the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, Dewar said that “many SNPO
veterans believe its records were destroyed after the office was abolished in
1973” and that “in particular, the chronology file of Harold Finger, Milton Klein
and David Gabriel, SNPO’s directors, would [be] invaluable” in determining the
complete story on NERVA. When reached for comment, Harold Finger clarified
that he left the program as director in 1968. “I have no knowledge of any
meltdown,” Finger said, suggesting that his former deputy Milton Klein might
know more. “I left the program as director in 1971,” Klein said, “and do not
have any information about what happened to NERVA in the end.”

In January of 2002, as part of the Nevada Environmental Restoration Project,
the National Nuclear Security Administration conducted a study regarding
proposed cleanup of the contaminated land at Area 25. The report revealed that
the following radioactive elements were still present at that time: “cobalt-60
(Co-60); strontium-90 (Sr-90); yttrium-90 (Y-90); niobium-94 (Nb-94); cesium-
137 (Cs-137); barium-137m (Ba-137m); europium-152, -154, and -155 (Eu-152,
Eu-154, and Eu-155); uranium-234, -235, -238 (U-234, U-235, U-238);
plutonium-239/240 (Pu-239/240); and americium-241 (Am-241),” and that these
radioactive contaminants “may have percolated into underlying soil.”

Twenty-eight years after NERVA’s questionable end at Jackass Flats, shortly
after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the radiated land at Area 25 started to serve a
new purpose when the Department of Homeland Security and the military began
training exercises there—including how to deal with cleaning up after a terrorist
attack involving a nuclear weapon. T. D. Barnes served as a consultant on
several of these endeavors.

NNSA spokesman Darwin Morgan discussed the WMD training that goes on
at the test site in a government film that plays at the Atomic Testing Museum in

Las Vegas. “It’s a PhD experience for first responders.” Morgan said of the test
site, “because the site offers real radiation they can’t get anywhere else.” Still,
the National Nuclear Security Administration declined to elaborate on how,
exactly, this “real radiation” that contaminated Area 25 occurred.

Perhaps in the early 1970s, the thinking at the Atomic Energy Commission
was that one day a nuclear facility could very well melt down in an American
city. Were this to happen, the commission could have argued, it would be a good
thing to know what to expect. By 1972, the nuclear energy industry had
experienced five “boom vear(s).” according to Atomic Energy Commission
archives. Without any kind of regulatory arm in place, the commission had been
promoting and developing nuclear reactor “units.” which are the fuel cores that
provide energy for nuclear power plants. By the end of 1967, the commission
had placed thirty units around the country. The following year, that number
jumped to ninety-one, and by 1972 there were one hundred and sixty nuclear
reactor units that the Atomic Energy Commission was in charge of overseeing at
power plants around the nation.

Six years after the end of the NERVA program at Jackass Flats, the nuclear
facility at Three Mile Island nearly melted down, on March 28, 1979. The
nuclear reactor there experienced a partial core meltdown because of a loss of
coolant. Officials were apparently stunned. “The people seemed dazed by a
situation that wasn’t covered in the manuals, torn between logic and standard
operating procedures, indecisive in the absence of a strong executive power,”
read a 1980 report on the disaster prepared for the public by the newly formed
Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Special Inquiry Group. Even though similar
accident scenarios had been conducted at Area 25, the “executive power,” which
was the Atomic Energy Commission, apparently did not share the information
with its partners at the power plants.

At the same time the Three Mile Island accident happened, a movie called
The China Syndrome was opening in theaters across the country. The movie was
about a government plot to conceal an imminent nuclear meltdown disaster, with
Jane Fonda playing a reporter determined to expose the plot. Although it was
clear to moviegoers that the film was fictional, it had been made with great
attention to technical detail. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Special
Inquiry Group determined that the combination of the two events—the real and
the fictional—resulted in a media firestorm. The fact that the near nuclear
meltdown happened in the media glare, wrote the commissioner, “may be the
best insurance that it will not reoccur.” The public’s so-called mass hysteria,

feared for decades by government elite, really did work in the public’s interest
after all. At Three Mile Island, the media firestorm and the public’s response to it
proved to act as a democratic “checks and balances” where the federal
government had failed.

For as many nuclear accidents of its own making as the Atomic Energy
Commission could foresee, they could not have predicted what happened on
January 24, 1978, when a nuclear-powered Russian spy satellite crashed on
North American soil, in Canada. NORAD analysts had been tracking Cosmos
954 since it launched, on September 18, 1977, but after three months, the
movements of the spy satellite were causing NORAD ever-increasing alarm. The
Russian satellite had been designed to track U.S. submarines running deep
beneath the surface of the sea, and what NORAD knew about the satellite was
that it was forty-six feet long and weighed 4.4 tons. To get that much payload
into orbit required phenomenal power, most likely nuclear.

In December of 1977, analysts determined that the Russian satellite was
slipping out of orbit, dropping closer and closer to Earth on each ninety-minute
rotation of the globe. Calculations indicated that unless the Russians could get
control of their satellite, Cosmos would, in all probability, reenter the
atmosphere and crash somewhere in North America within a month. President
Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski pressed Moscow for
information about what exactly was on board the crashing satellite. The Russians
told Brzezinski that Cosmos 954 carried 110 pounds of highly enriched uranium
235.

Richard Mingus worked at the Department of Energy’s emergency command
center, located in Las Vegas, during the crisis. The center was in charge of
controlling public information about the looming nuclear disaster, following
directions from the CIA. According to a secret CIA report declassified in 1997, a
decision was made not to inform the public . Trying to predict the public’s
reaction to a nuclear satellite crash was like “playing night baseball with the
lights out.” wrote CIA analyst Gus Weiss, because “the outcome of [Cosmos]

954 would be akin to determining the winner of a train wreck.” The CIA knew
exactly what would happen, and that was that “the satellite was coming down
carrying a live reactor.” The CIA also believed that “a sensationalized leak
would disturb the public in unforeseeable ways.” This information has never
been made public before.

“It was extremely tense.” recalls Richard Mingus, who spent several days
fielding calls at the emergency command center. By 1978, NEST —Nuclear

Emergency Search Team—was finally trained to handle nuclear disasters. The
man in charge was Brigadier General Mahlon E. Gates, also the manager of the
Nevada Test Site. According to Gates, “the nucleus for NEST-related activity
was established within EG&G . which had responsibility for overall logistics” to
the nuclear lab workers and those assigned to NEST by the federal government.
The team waited on standby at McCarran Airport, “ready to go the minute the
thing crash-landed,” Mingus says. “Our job at the emergency command center
was to keep people across America from panicking.” All that Brzezinski had
said publicly was that America was experiencing a “space age difficulty.”

Mingus believes this was the right move. “The satellite was still pretty high up,
there was no radioactive danger until it actually hit the ground. But imagine the
panic if people, or say a mayor of a city, started calling for cities to evacuate
based on where they thought the satellite was going to crash down on the next
ninety-minute rotation?” Mingus says the feeling at the command center was
that if that were to happen, it would be panic like in The War of the Worlds.

When Cosmos 954 finally crashed, it hit the earth across a large swath of ice
in the middle of the frozen Canadian tundra, one thousand miles north of
Montana on Great Slave Lake. At McCarran Airport a fleet of unmarked NEST
vans— meant to look like bakery vans but really loaded with banks of gamma-
and neutron-detection equipment inside—drove into the belly of a giant C-130
transport plane and prepared to head north. NEST personnel included the usual
players in the nuclear military-industrial complex: scientists and engineers from
Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, and EG&G. Troy Wade was the lead federal
official dispatched to the crash site. Looking back, he explains, “It was the
radioactive fuel we were most concerned about. If a piece comes down that
weighs a ton, you can’t predict how far and wide the debris, including all that
fuel, will go.”

For this reason, the first order of business was detecting radiation levels from
the air. Wade and the EG&G remote-sensing team loaded small aircraft and
helicopters into the belly of the C-130, alongside the unmarked bread vans, and
headed for the Canadian tundra. As part of Operation Morning Light, NEST
members scoured a fifty-by-eight-hundred-mile corridor searching for
radioactive debris. “This was long before the advent of GPS. There were no
mountains to navigate by,” Wade says. “The pilots had no reference points. Just
a lot of snow and ice out there. Temperatures of nearly fifty degrees below zero.”
Helping out from high above was an Air Force U-2 spy plane.

After several long months, 90 percent of the debris from Cosmos 954 had

been recovered. In the postaccident analysis, officials at NORAD determined
that if the satellite had made one last orbit before crashing, its trajectory would
have put it down somewhere on America’s East Coast .

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Lunar-Landing Conspiracy and Other Legends of

Area SI

Two hundred and fifty thousand miles from the Nevada Test Site, on July 20.
1969 . with less than ninety-four seconds of fuel remaining, Neil Armstrong and
copilot Buzz Aldrin were facing almost certain death as they approached the Sea
of Tranquillity on the moon. The autotargeting on their lunar landing module,
famously called the Eagle, was taking them down onto a football-field-size
crater laden with jagged boulders. To have crash-landed there would have meant
death. The autotargeting was burning precious fuel with each passing second; the
quick-thinking Neil Armstrong turned it off, took manual control of the Eagle,
and, as he would tell NASA officials at Mission Control in Houston, Texas, only
moments later, began “flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably
good area” to land. When Armstrong finally set the Eagle down safely on the
moon, there was a mere twenty seconds’ worth of fuel left in the descent tanks.

Practice makes perfect, and no doubt Armstrong’s hundreds of hours flying
experimental aircraft like the X-15 rocket ship—in dangerous and often death-
defying scenarios—helped prepare him for piloting a safe landing on the moon.
As with most seminal U.S. government accomplishments, particularly those
involving science, it took thousands of men working hundreds of thousands of
hours inside scores of research centers and test facilities—not to mention a
number of chemical rockets designed by Wernher Von Braun—to get the Apollo
11 astronauts and five additional crews (Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17) to the
moon and back home. A little-known fact is that to prepare for what it would
actually be like to walk around on the geology of the moon, the astronauts
visited the Nevada Test Site . There, they hiked inside several atomic craters,

learning what kind of geology they might have to deal with on the lunar
surface’s inhospitable terrain. The Atomic Energy Commission’s Ernie Williams
was their guide .

“I spent three days with the astronauts in Areas 7, 9, and 10 during astronaut
training, several years before they went to the moon,” Williams recalls. In the
1960s, astronauts had rock-star status, and Williams remembered the event like it
was yesterday. “The astronauts had coveralls and wore field packs, mock-ups of
the real thing, strapped on their backs. They had cameras mounted on their hats
and they took turns walking up and down the subsidence craters. It was steep,
rocky terrain,” he explains. Williams originally worked for the Atomic Energy
Commission in feeding and housing, making sure the “feed wagon” got to
remote areas of the atomic bombing range. “We’d get mashed potatoes and
gravy to the faraway places inside the test site,” Williams says, “hot food being a
key to morale.” But the multitalented Williams quickly became the test site’s
jack-of-all-trades, including astronaut guide. His other jobs included being in
charge of the motor pool and helping CIA engineers drill for Area 51’s first
water well . But for Williams, the highlight of his career was escorting the first
men on the moon inside the atomic craters.

“I was with them in 1965, and again five years later when they came back,”
Williams recalls. This time the astronauts arrived with a lunar roving vehicle to
test what it might be like driving on the moon. The astronauts were taken out to
the Schooner crater, located on the Pahute Mesa in Area 20. “We picked them up
at the Pahute airstrip and took them and the vehicle into the crater where there
was pretty rough terrain,” Williams explains. “Some boulders out there were ten
feet tall. One of the astronauts said, Tf we encounter this kind of thing on the
moon, we’re not going to get very far.’” Williams recalls the astronauts learning
how to fix a flat tire on the moon. “They took off a steel tire and put on a rubber
one” out in the field.

The lunar roving vehicle was not a fast-moving vehicle, and the astronauts
took turns driving it. “NASA had built it and had driven it in a lot of flat places,”
Williams explains. “But before it came to the test site and drove on the craters,
the vehicle had no real experience on inhospitable terrain. The astronauts also
did a lot of walking out there,” Williams adds. One of the requirements of the
Apollo astronauts who would be driving during moon missions was that they had
to be able to walk back to the lunar module if the rover failed.

The craters Williams was talking about are subsidence craters—geologic by¬
products of underground bomb tests . When a nuclear bomb is placed in a deep

vertical shaft, as hundreds were at the test site (not to be confused with tunnel
tests), the explosion vaporizes the surrounding earth and liquefies the rock. Once
that molten rock cools, it solidifies at the bottom of the cavity, and the earth
above it collapses, creating the crater. The glass-coated rock, giant boulders, and
loose rubble that remain resemble the craters found on the moon. So similar in
geology were the atomic craters to moon craters that in voice transcripts sent
back during the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, astronauts twice referred to
the craters at the Nevada Test Site. During Apollo 16, John W. Young got
specific. A quarter of a million miles away from Earth, while marveling at a
lunar crater laden with rocks, Young asked fellow astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr.,
“Remember how it was up at that crater? At Schooner.” He was referring to the
atomic crater Ernie Williams took the astronauts to in Area 20. During Apollo
17, while looking at the Haemus Mountains, Harrison H. Schmitt can be heard
talking about the Buckboard Mesa craters in Area 19. For Ernie Williams,
hearing this comparison was a beautiful moment . For lunar-landing conspiracy
theorists, of which there are millions worldwide, the feeling was one of
suspicion. For these naysayers, Schmitt’s telemetry tapes, the moon photographs,
the moon rocks—everything having to do with the Apollo moon missions would
become grist for a number of ever-growing conspiracies that have been tied to
man’s journey to the moon.

Just two months after Armstrong and Aldrin returned home, a UFO-on-the-
moon conspiracy was born. On September 29, 1969, in New York City, the
newest installment of National Bulletin magazine rolled off the printing press
with a shocking headline: “Phony Transmission Failure Hides Apollo 11
Discovery. Moon Is a UFO Base,” it read. The author of the article, Sam Pepper,
said he’d been leaked a transcript of what NASA had allegedly edited out of the
live broadcast back from the moon, namely, that there were UFOs there. Various
UFO groups pressed their congressmen to take action, several of whom wrote to
NASA requesting a response. “The incident... did not take place,” NASA’s
assistant administrator for legal affairs shot back in a memo from January 1970.

As time passed the ufologists continued to write stories about the moon being
a base for aliens and UFOs . For the most part, NASA ignored them. But then, in
the midseventies, a newly famous film director named Steven Spielberg decided
to make a film about aliens coming down to visit Earth. He sent NASA officials
his script for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, expecting their endorsement.
Instead, NASA sent Spielberg an angry twenty-page letter opposing his film. “I
had wanted co-operation from them,” Spielberg said in a 1978 interview , “but

when they read the script they got very angry and felt that it was a film that
would be dangerous. I think they mainly wrote the letter because Jaws
convinced so many people around the world that there were sharks in toilets and
bathtubs, not just in the oceans and rivers. They were afraid the same kind of
epidemic would happen with UFOs.” Fringe ufologists were one thing as far as
NASA was concerned. Steven Spielberg had millions of movie fans. He was a
modern-day version of Orson Welles.

Right around the same time, another moon conspiracy theorist let his idea
loose on the American public, a theory that did not involve UFOs. In 1974, a
man named William Kaysing self-published a book called We Never Went to the
Moon: America’s Thirty-Billion-Dollar Swindle. With these three questions .
Kaysing became known as the father of the lunar-landing conspiracy:

How can the American flag flutter when there is no wind on the moon?
Why can’t the stars be seen in the moon photographs?

Why is there no blast crater where Apollo’s landing vehicle landed?

Kaysing, who died in 2005, often said his skepticism began when he was an
analyst and engineer at Rocketdyne, the company that designed the Saturn
rockets that allowed man to get to the moon. While watching the lunar landing
live on television, he said he experienced “an intuitive feeling that what was
being shown was not real.” Later, he began scrutinizing the moon-landing
photographs for evidence of a hoax. Kaysing’s original three questions have
since planted seeds in millions upon millions of people who continue to insist
that NASA did not put men on the moon. The lunar-landing conspiracy ebbs and
flows in popularity, but as of 2011, it shows no signs of going away.

In August 2001 Kaysing was interviewed by Katie Couric on the Today
show . By then, Kaysing’s theory had morphed to involve Area 51. He was often
quoted as saying that the Apollo landings were filmed at a movie studio there.
“Area 51 is one of the most heavily guarded facilities in the United States,”
Kaysing said, and anyone who tried to go there “could be shot and killed without
any warning. With good reason... because the moon sets are still there.”

In the twenty-first century, a new generation of moon hoaxers walk in
Kaysing’s footsteps to expose what they say is NASA’s fraud. Like the game of
Whac-A-Mole, as soon as one element of the conspiracy appears to be disproven
another allegation surfaces—from missing telemetry tapes to outright murder. So

aggravated has America’s formidable space agency become over the moon
hoaxers that in 2002, NASA hired aerospace historian Jim Oberg to write a book
meant to challenge conspiracy theorists’ questions and claims—now numbering
hundreds—in a point-by-point rebuttal. When news of the project was leaked to
the media, NASA got such bad press over it they canceled the book .

The idea that the moon landing was faked was born at a time of high
government mistrust. In 1974, for the first time in history, a U.S. president
resigned. In 1975, the CIA admitted it had been running mind-control programs ,
a number of which involved human experiments with dangerous, illegal drugs.
Then, in April, Saigon fell. The general antigovernment feeling was heightened
by the fact that while government proved capable of many nefarious deeds it had
been unable to win the war in Vietnam; 58.193 Americans were killed trying .

Kaysing was also tapping into a tradition. There had been one successful
Great Moon Hoax already, over 130 years earlier, in 1835. Beginning on August
25 of that year, the New York Sun published a series of six articles claiming
falsely that life and civilization had been discovered on the moon. According to
the newspaper story, winged humans, beavers the size of people, and unicorns
were seen through a powerful telescope belonging to Sir John Herschel, the most
famous astronomer at the time. Editions of the newspapers sold out, were
reprinted, and sold out again. Circulation soared, and the New York Sun made
tremendous profits over the story, which readers believed to be true. On the
subject of the public’s gullibility, Edgar Allan Poe, who also wrote for the paper,
said, “The story’s impact reflects on the period’s infatuation with progress.” But
the original Great Moon Hoax came and went without a conspiratorial bent
because there was no government entity to blame. It was a publicity stunt to sell
papers, not perceived as a nefarious plan by a government elite to manipulate
and control the common man.

Shortly after Kaysing’s book was published (it is still in print as of 2011), a
1978 Hollywood film followed along the same lines. Peter Hyams’s Capricorn
One told the story of a faked NASA landing on Mars. Even James Bond entered
the act, referencing a lunar-landing conspiracy in the film Diamonds Are
Forever. From there, the moon-hoax theory remained a quiet staple among
conspiracy theorists for decades, but with the rise of the Internet in the late
1990s, the moon-hoax concept resurfaced and eventually made its way into the
mainstream press. In February of 2001, Fox TV aired a documentary-style
hourlong segment called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon ? and
the debate was rekindled around the world. This gave way to an unusual twenty-

first-century moon-hoax twist.

In September of 2002, Buzz Aldrin. the second man on the moon , agreed to
be interviewed by Far Eastern TV. This was because “they seemed like
legitimate journalists/’ Aldrin explains. Buzz Aldrin has the highest profile of
the twelve Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon, and he regularly gives
interviews. A former fighter pilot, Aldrin flew sixty-six combat missions and
shot down two MiG-15s in the Korean War. He is also an MIT-trained physicist,
which affords him extra fluency when discussing outer space. Sitting in a suite in
the Luxe Hotel in Beverly Hills in the fall of 2002, it did not take long for Aldrin
to realize something was awry when the TV interviewer began asking him
questions involving conspiracy theories. “I tried redirecting the discussion back
to a legitimate discussion about space,” Aldrin says. Instead the interviewer
played a clip from the Fox documentary about moon hoaxes. Aldrin believes
“conspiracy theories are a waste of everybody’s time and energy,” and he got up
and left the interview. “I’m someone who has dealt with the exact science of
space rendezvous and orbital mechanics, so to have someone approach me and
seriously suggest that Neil, Mike, and I never actually went to the moon, but that
the entire trip had been staged in a sound studio someplace, has to rank with one
of the most ludicrous ideas I’ve ever heard,” says Aldrin.

Then, down in the hotel lobby, a large man in his midthirties approached
Buzz Aldrin and tried to spark a conversation. The man, whose name was Bart
Sibrel, had a film crew with him. “Hey, Buzz, how are you?” Sibrel asked, the
cameras rolling. Aldrin said hello and headed out toward the street. Sibrel
hurried along beside him, asking more questions. Then he pulled out a very large
Bible and began shaking it in the former astronaut’s face. “Will you swear on the
Bible that you really walked on the moon?” Aldrin, who was seventy-two at the
time, said, “You conspiracy people don’t know what you’re talking about” and
turned to walk in the other direction. The man began hurling personal insults and
accusations at Aldrin. “Your life is a complete lie!” the man shouted. “And here
you are making money by giving interviews about things you never did!” The
conspiracy theorist ran in front of Aldrin, blocking his way across the road.
Aldrin, who had his stepdaughter with him, walked back to the hotel and asked
the bellman to call the police. “You’re a coward, Buzz Aldrin!” shouted the
conspiracy theorist. “You’re a liar; you’re a thief!” Aldrin said he’d had enough:
“Maybe it was the West Point cadet in me, or perhaps it was the Air Force
fighter pilot. Or maybe I’d just had enough of his belligerent character
assassination... I popped him.” The second man on the moon punched the lunar-

landing conspiracy theorist squarely in the jaw, cameras catching it all on tape.

In no time, the video footage was airing on the news, on CNN, on Jay Leno
and David Letterman. CNN political commentator Paul Begala gave Aldrin the
thumbs-up for pushing back against conspiracy theorists. But elsewhere, all
across America, many millions of people agreed with the conspiracy theorists
who believed that the lunar landing was a hoax. By the fortieth anniversary of
the historic Apollo 11 mission, in 2009, polls conducted in America, England,
and Russia revealed that approximately 25 percent of the people interviewed
believed the moon landing never happened. Many said they believed that it was
faked and filmed at Area 51.

As of 2011, the lunar-landing conspiracy is one of three primary conspiracies
said to have been orchestrated at Area 51. The other two that dominate
conspiracy thinking involve captured aliens and UFOs , and an underground
tunnel and bunker system that supposedly exists below Area 51 and connects it
to other military facilities and nuclear laboratories around the country. Each
conspiracy theory contains elements of fact, and each is perceived differently by
the three government agencies they target: NASA, the CIA, and the Department
of Defense. In each conspiracy theory lies an important clue about the real truth
behind Area 51.

Michael Schratt, who writes books and travels around the country giving
lectures about government cover-ups at Area 51, says that the secret facility is
“directly connected to Edwards [Air Force Base] North Base Complex and Air
Force Plant 42 at Palmdale by an underground tube-shuttle tunnel system
developed by the Rand Corporation and others [circa] 1960.” Schratt also says
that Area 51 is “very likely connected to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in
Ohio” this same way. “ The tunnels were dug by a nuclear-powered drill that can
dig three miles of tunnel a day,” Schratt says. “These tunnels also connect, by
underground train, to other military facilities where leaders of government will
go and live after a nuclear event” such as World War III.

In fact, underground tunnels, called N-tunnels. P-tunnels. and T-tunnels . have
been drilled next door to Area 51, at the Nevada Test Site, for decades. The
1,150-foot-long tunnel at Jackass Flats, drilled into the Calico Mountains,
through which NERVA scientists and engineers like T. D. Barnes accessed their
underground workstations is but one example of an underground tunnel at the
Nevada Test Site. The NERVA complex in Area 25 has since been dismantled
and “deactivated.” according to the Department of Energy , but elsewhere at the
test site dozens of tunnel complexes exist. In the 1960s, one tunnel dug into the

granite mountain of Rainer Mesa, in Area 12, reached down as far as 4,500 feet,
nearly a mile underground. There are many such government tunnels and
bunkers around America, but it was the revelation of the Greenbrier bunker by
Washington Post reporter Ted Gup in 1992 that set off a firestorm of conspiracy
theories related to postapocalypse hideouts for the U.S. government elite—and
since 1992, these secret bunkers have been woven into conspiracy theories about
things that go on at Area 51.

The Greenbrier bunker is located in the Allegheny Mountains, 250 miles
southwest of the nation’s capital. Beginning in 1959, the Department of Defense
spearheaded the construction of a 112,544-square-foot facility eight hundred feet
below the West Virginia wing of the fashionable five-star Greenbrier resort. This
secret bunker, completed in 1962, was to be the place where the president and
certain members of Congress would live after a nuclear attack. The Greenbrier
bunker had dormitories, a mess hall, decontamination chambers, and a hospital
staffed with thirty-five doctors. “ Secrecy, denying knowledge of the existence of
the shelter from our potential enemies, was paramount to all matters of
operation,” Paul Bugas, the former onsite superintendent at the Greenbrier
bunker, told PBS when asked why the facility was kept secret from the public.
Many citizens agree with the premise. Conspiracy theorists disagree. They don’t
believe that the government keeps secrets to protect the people. Conspiracy
theorists believe the leaders of government are only looking to protect
themselves.

The underground tunnels and bunkers at the Nevada Test Site may be the
most elaborate underground chambers ever constructed by the federal
government in the continental United States. The great majority of them are in
Area 12, which is located approximately sixteen miles due west of Area 51 in a
mountain range called Rainier Mesa. Beginning in 1957, massive tunnel
complexes were drilled into the volcanic rock and granite by hard-rock miners
working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To complete a single
tunnel took, on average, twelve months . Most tunnels ran approximately 1,300
feet below the surface of the earth, but some reached a mile underground. Inside
these giant cavities, which averaged one hundred feet wide, the Atomic Energy
Commission and the Department of Defense have exploded at least sixtv-seven
nuclear bombs . There, the military has tested nuclear blast and radiation effects
on everything from missile nose cones to military satellites. A series called the
Piledriver experiments studied survivability of hardened underground bunkers in
a nuclear attack. The Hardtack tests sought to learn how “ to destroy enemy

targets Tsuch asl missile silos and command centers” using megaton bombs.
Inside the T-tunnels, scientists created vacuum chambers to simulate outer space,
expanding on those dangerous late-1950s upper atmospheric tests code-named
Teak and Orange. And the Department of Defense even tested how a stockpile of
nuclear weapons inside an underground bunker would hold up to a nuclear blast.

Richard Mingus has spent many years inside these underground tunnel
complexes, guarding many of the nuclear bombs used in the tests before they
were detonated. In Mingus’s five decades working at the test site, these were his
least favorite assignments. “The tunnels were dirty, filthy, you had to wear heavy
shoes because there was so much walking on all kinds of rock rubble,” Mingus
explains. “The air was bad and everything was stuffy. There were so many
people working so many different jobs. Carpenters, welders... There were forty-
eight-inch cutting machines covering the ground.” Most of the equipment was
hauled in on railroad tracks, which is at least partially responsible for inspiring
conspiracy theories that include trains underneath Area 51—though the
conspiracy theorists believe they’re able to ferry government elite back and forth
between Nevada and the East Coast. In reality, according to Atomic Energy
Commission records, the Defense Department built the train system in the
tunnels to transport heavy military equipment in and out. If employees wanted
to, men like Richard Mingus could ride the train cars down into the underground
tunnel complexes, but Mingus preferred to walk.

Unlike atmospheric weapons tests or the atomic tests in vertical shafts that
made the moonlike craters, for the T-tunnel nuclear tests, the bomb was one of
the first items to arrive on scene. “The bomb was cemented in the back of the
tunnel, in a room called the zero room,” Mingus says. “That was about three-
quarters of a mile distance.” Sometimes, Mingus would stand guard with the
nuclear bomb at the end of the tunnel for eight- or ten-hour shifts, so he chose to
walk in each morning “for the exercise.” Mingus also disliked the assignments
inside the underground tunnels because they reminded him of a part of his early
life he would rather have forgotten. “When I was a kid working the coal mines,”
Mingus explains. But as anxious as a man standing guard over live nuclear
bombs might have been, Mingus remained calm. He says the coal mines of his
youth were far more dangerous. “There were no electric drills back then so my
brother and I drilled by hand. We’d get down on our knees in those little tunnels
—three and a half feet wide, not tall enough to stand up in. We’d use black
powder as an explosive, not dynamite. We’d set the powder in the hole, tap it
with a rod, use a fuse that was like toilet paper, light it, run out, and then wait for

the smoke to clear. Some things you never forget even if you want to,” Mingus
says.

Before the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Pentagon maintained a
policy of announcing nuclear weapons tests to the public, usually one or two
hours before shot time, which meant somewhere around 3:30 a.m. the day of the
blast. After the test ban, the Pentagon reversed its policy . Information about
underground tests—when they were to take place and how big they would be—
was now classified secret. Only if a scientist predicted that an earthquake-like
tremor might be felt in Las Vegas, sixty-five miles to the south, was a public
announcement made in advance of the nuclear test. And so, from 1963 until the
last test in 1992, approximately eight hundred tests were conducted
underground. By the late 1990s, decades after the first drills bored into the rock
at the Nevada Test Site, the nuclear bombs, the hard-rock miners, and Area 51
had merged into one entity. As it is with many urban legends regarding Area 51,
the underground-tunnels idea has been spun from facts.

As creative as conspiracy theorists can be when it comes to Area 51, it is
surprising how they have missed the one underlying element that connects the
three primary conspiracy theories about the secret facility to the truth. For
conspiracy theorists, in the captured-aliens-and-UFOs narrative, the federal
agency orchestrating the plot is the CIA. In the lunar-landing conspiracy the
agency committing the fraud is NASA. In the underground tunnels and bunker
plot, the evil operating force is the Department of Defense. And yet the one
agency that plays an actual role in the underlying facts regarding all three of
these conspiracy theories is the Atomic Energy Commission.

Why have conspiracy theorists missed this connection? Why has the Atomic
Energy Commission escaped the scrutiny it deserves? The truth is hidden out in
the desert at the Nevada Test Site. To borrow the metaphor of CIA spymaster
James Angleton, that is where a “wilderness of mirrors” can be found. Angleton
believed the Soviets spun lies from lies and in doing so were able to keep
America’s intelligence agents lost in an illusory forest. In this same manner,
throughout the Cold War the Atomic Energy Commission created its own
wilderness of mirrors out in the Nevada desert, built from illusory half-truths and
outright lies. The commission was able to send the public further and further
away from the truth, not with “mirrors” but by rubber-stamping documents with
Restricted Data, Secret, and Confidential, to keep them out of the public eye.

The Area 51 conspiracy theories that were born of the Cold War—the ones
peopled by aliens, piloted by UFOs, set in underground cities and on movie sets
of the moon—these conspiracies all stand to aid and assist the Atomic Energy
Commission in keeping the public away from secret truths.

It is no coincidence that the agency behind some of the most secret and
dangerous acts out in the desert—at the Nevada Test and Training Range, the
Nevada Test Site, and Area 51— has changed its name four times . First it was
called the Manhattan Project, during World War II. Then, in 1947, it changed its
name to the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC. In 1975 the agency was
renamed the Energy Research and Development Administration, or ERDA. In
1977 it was renamed again, this time the Department of Energy, “the government
department whose mission is to advance technology and promote related
innovation in the United States,” which conveniently makes it sound more like
Apple Corporation than the federal agency that produced seventy thousand
nuclear bombs. Finally, in 2000, the nuclear weapons side of the agency got a
new name for the fourth time: the National Nuclear Security Administration, or
NNSA, a department nestled away inside the Department of Energy, or DOE. In
August 2010, even the Nevada Test Site changed its name. It is now called the
Nevada National Security Site, or NNSS.

Since the National Security Act of 1947 reorganized government after the
war, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force
have all maintained their original names. The cabinet-level Departments of State,
Labor, Transportation, Justice, and Education are all called today what they were
when they were born. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has changed its name
once since its formal beginning in 1908 . Originally it was called the Bureau of
Investigation, or BOI. By changing the name of the nation’s nuclear weapons
agency four times since its creation in 1942, does the federal government hope
the nefarious secrets of the Atomic Energy Commission will simply disappear?
Certainly, many of its records have.

James Angleton spent his career trying to prove Soviet deception. Angleton
argued that totalitarian governments had the capacity to confuse and manipulate
the West to such a degree that the downfall of democracy was inevitable unless
the Soviet deceivers could be stopped. Angleton’s belief system made him
paranoid and extreme. For three years, he imprisoned a Soviet double agent and
former KGB officer named Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko in a secret CIA prison in the
United States—subjecting Nosenko to varying degrees of torture in an effort to
break him and get him to tell the “truth.” (After passing multiple polygraph tests,

Nosenko was eventually released and resettled under an assumed identity. His
true allegiance remains the subject of debate .) The Nosenko affair brought about
Angleton’s personal downfall. He was fired and he left the Agency disgraced.
Deception may be a game between governments but the consequences of
engaging in it are, for some, very real.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union did not have the monopoly on
deception. In 1995, after President Clinton ordered his Advisory Committee on
Human Radiation Experiments to look into Cold War secret-keeping at the
Atomic Energy Commission, disturbing documentation was found. In a
memorandum dated May 1. 1995 . the subject line chosen by Clinton’s
committee to sum up early AEC secret-keeping protocol read: “Official
Classification Policy to Cover Up Embarrassment.” One of the more damaging
documents unearthed by Clinton’s staff was a September 1947 memo by the
Atomic Energy Commission’s general manager John Derry. In a document
Clinton’s staff called the Derry Memo the Atomic Energy Commission ruled:
“ All documents and correspondence relating to matters of policy and procedures,
the given knowledge of which might compromise or cause embarrassment to the
Atomic Energy Commission and/or its contractors,” should be classified secret
or confidential.

Clinton’s staff also discovered a document that read: “... there are a large
number of papers which do not violate security, but do cause considerable
concern to the Atomic Energy Commission Insurance Branch .” In other words,
the commission classified many documents because it did not want to get sued.

A particular problem arose, the memo continued, “in the declassification of
medical papers on human administration experiments done to date .” To find a
way around the problem the commission consulted with its “Atomic Energy
Commission Insurance Branch.” The conclusion was that if anything was going
to be declassified it should first be “reworded or deleted” so as not to result in a
legal claim.

The Internet is where conspiracy theorists share ideas, the great majority of
which involve government plots. It is ironic that the Internet, originally called
the DARPA Internet Program, was launched by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (originally called ARPA) in 1969 as a means for the military to
communicate digitally during the Vietnam War. In 2011 there are an estimated
1.96 billion Internet users worldwide—almost one-third of the people on the
planet—and the most popular conspiracy Web site based in America is
AboveTopSecret.com. According to CEO Bill Irvine, the site sees five million

visitors each month. AboveTopSecret.com has approximately 2.4 million pages
of content, including 10.6 million individual posts. The Web site’s motto is Deny
Ignorance , and its members say they are people who “rage against the mindless
status-quo.”

Of 25,000 AboveTopSecret.com users polled in 2011, the second most
popular discussion thread involves extraterrestrials and UFO cover-ups at Area
51. But the single most popular discussion thread at AboveTop Secret.com is
something called the New World Order. According to Bill Irvine, this idea has
gained momentum at an “astonishing rate” over the past two years. Irvine says it
serves as a nexus conspiracy for many others, including those based at Area 51.

The premise of the New World Order conspiracy theory is that a powerful,
secretive cabal of men are aspiring to take over the planet through a totalitarian,
one-world government. Some believers of the New World Order call it the
Fourth Reich because, they say, it will be similar to Germany’s Third Reich,
including Nazi eugenics, militarism, and Orwellian monitoring of citizens’
private lives. As outlandish as this New World Order conspiracy may seem to
non-conspiracy thinkers, it touches upon the original secret at Area 51—the real
reason why the U.S. government cannot admit that Area 51 exists.

CHAPTER TWENTY

From Camera Bays to Weapons Bays . the Air Force

Takes Control

What happened at Area 51 during the 1980s? Most of the work remains
classified and very little else is known. One of the most sensational near
catastrophes to happen at Area 51 during this time has never before been
revealed—notably not even hinted at in Area 51 legend or lore. It involved a
mock helicopter attack at the guard station that separates the Nevada Test Site
from Area 51. So serious was the situation, which included semiautomatic
weapons and a nuclear bomb, that both the Pentagon and the White House
stepped in.

One of the greatest potential threats to Area 51 in terms of an enemy attack
would be from low-flying aircraft or helicopter. “A helicopter would be the
aerial vehicle of choice,” says Barnes. “Whereas an airplane would be seen
airborne long before it reached its target, a helicopter could be trucked in and
then launched only a short distance from the restricted area. In that case, the
helicopter would breach the security protection before defending aircraft from
Area 51 could become airborne.” Which is why, to prepare against such threats,
security guards like Richard Mingus would often participate in counterattack
tests using large low-flying helium balloons as targets. “The balloons simulated
helicopters,” Mingus explains. The tests used aging V-100 Commando armored
personnel carriers, complete with mounted machine guns, left over from the
Vietnam War. With four-wheel drive, high clearance, and excellent mobility, the
retired amphibious armored car would ferry Mingus and his team of heavily
armed sensitive assignment specialists as far as they could get up the mountain
range, until the terrain became too steep.

“We’d park the V-100, run the rest of the way up the mountain with machine
guns, set up on top of the mountain, and fire at these forty-inch weather
balloons. There’d always be a driver, a supervisor, and a loader on the SAS
team. We each had an assignment. One guy kept score.” Scores were important
because the stakes were so high. The Nevada Test Site was the single most
prolific atomic bombing facility in the world. It had a three-decade-long history
of impeccable security, as did Area 51. Which is what made the breach that
Mingus witnessed so radical.

It was a scorching-hot day during the Ronald Reagan presidency, the kind of
day at the test site when people knew not to touch metal surfaces outside or
they’d wind up getting burned. Mingus believes it was 1982 but can’t say for
sure, as the event was specifically kept off of his Department of Energy logbook.
No longer a security guard, Mingus had been promoted to security operations
coordinator for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. At the time the near
catastrophe occurred, the rank-and-file security entourage was escorting a
nuclear device down Rainier Mesa Road. The bomb, one of eighteen exploded
underground at the Nevada Test Site in 1982, was going to be exploded in an
underground shaft. As the five-man security response team trailed behind the
bomb transport vehicle (in an armored vehicle of its own), they made sure to
keep a short distance behind the nuclear device, as was protocol. “There was a
driver, a supervisor, a gunner operating the turret, a loader making sure the
ammo feeds into the machine guns and doesn’t jam, and two riflemen,” Richard
Mingus explains. There is always distance between the security team and the
bomb: “One of the riflemen handles the tear gas and the other works the grenade
launcher. You can shoot both weapons from either the shoulder or the hip.
They’ll hit a target fifty or seventy-five yards away because if you find yourself
under attack and having to shoot, you want distance. You don’t want the tear gas
coming back and getting you in the nose.”

After the security response team and the nuclear bomb arrived at that day’s
ground zero, a team of engineers and crane operators began the process of
getting the weapon safely and securely inside an approximately eight-hundred-
foot-deep hole that had been drilled into the desert floor and would house the
bomb. Inserting a live nuclear weapon into a narrow, five-foot-diameter shaft
required extraordinary precision by a single engineer operating a heavy metal
crane. There was no room for error. The crane worked in hundred-foot
increments, which in test site-speak were called picks. Only after the second
pick was reached, meaning the bomb was two hundred feet down, was the

security eased up. Then and only then would two of the men from the response
team be released. Until that moment, the bomb was considered unsecured.

Richard Mingus had been part of dozens of ground zero teams over the past
quarter of a century but on this particular morning circa 1982 Mingus was
coordinating security operations for Livermore from inside a building called the
control point, which was located in Area 6, ten miles from the bomb. The
nuclear bomb was just about to reach the second pick when chaos entered the
scene.

“I was sitting at my desk at the control point when I got the call,” Mingus
says. “Dick Stock, the device systems engineer supervising the shot at ground
zero, says over the phone, ‘We’re under attack over at the device assembly
building!”’ In the 1980s, the device assembly building was the place where the
bomb components were married with the nuclear material. Because there were
several nuclear weapons tests scheduled for that same week, Mingus knew there
were likely additional nuclear weapons in the process of being put together at the
device assembly building, in Area 27, which Mingus had good reason to believe
was now under attack. “Dick Stock said he heard the information coming over
the radios that the guys on the security response team were carrying” on their
belts. Now it was up to Mingus to make the call about what to do next.

In the twenty-six years he had been employed at the test site, Richard Mingus
had worked his way up from security guard to Livermore’s operations
coordinator. He was an American success story. After his father died in 1941,
Mingus dropped out of high school to work the coal mines. Eventually he went
back to school, got a diploma, and joined the Air Force to serve in the Korean
War. At the test site, Mingus had paid his dues. For years he stood guard over
classified projects in the desert, through scorching-hot summers and cold
winters, all the while guarding nuclear bombs and lethal plutonium-dispersal
tests. By the mid-1960s, Mingus had saved enough overtime pay to buy a home
for his family, which now included the young son he and Gloria had always
dreamed about. By the mid-1970s, Mingus had enough money to purchase a
second home, a hunting cabin in the woods. By the early 1980s, he had been
promoted so many times, he qualified for GS-12, which in federal service
hierarchy is only three rungs below the top grade, GS-15. “I attended the school
for nuclear weapons orientation at Kirtland Air Force Base and had passed a
series of advanced courses,” Mingus says. “But nothing, and I mean nothing,
prepares you for the experience of thinking the nuclear material you are guarding
is under attack.”

During that chaotic morning, Mingus knew all he could afford to focus on
was the bomb in the hole. “I thought to myself, Dick Stock said the bomb is
almost two picks down the hole. We’re under attack here. What’s best? I asked
myself. If someone put a gun to the head of the crane operator and said, 'Get it
out’ they’d have a live nuclear bomb in their possession. I knew I had to make a
decision. Was it safer to pull the bomb up or keep sending it down? I decided it
was better to have a big problem at ground zero than somewhere else so I gave
the order. I said, 'Keep the device going down.’”

Mingus had a quick conversation with Joe Behne . the test director, about
what was going on. The men agreed Mingus should call the head of security for
the Department of Energy, a woman by the name of Pat Williams. “She said,
‘Yes, we hear the same thing and we have to assume the same thing. We are
under attack as far as I know,”’ Mingus recalls.

Next Mingus called Larry Ferderber, the resident manager of the Nevada Test
Site for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Two minutes later
Ferderber confirms the same thing, he says, ‘I hear we’re under attack.’” Mingus
and Behne went through the protocol checklist. “Joe and I discussed going down
to the basement and destroying the crypto which was in my building. Then we
decided that it was too early for that. When you look out and you see guns firing,
like on the USS Pueblo, then it’s time to start destroying things. But not before.”

Instead, Mingus called Bill Baker, the man who ran the device assembly
building. With an attack now confirmed by the spokesperson for the Department
of Energy and the test site manager, Mingus had to work fast. “I asked Bill
Baker what was going on,” Mingus recalls. “He said, real calm, ‘We’re fine over
here. I’m looking out the window. I can see Captain Williams standing outside.’”
Mingus got off the telephone and had another discussion with Joe Behne. “I told
Joe, I said, ‘We can’t buy his word. He could be under duress. He could have a
knife at his neck or a gun at his head.’”

Meanwhile, just a few miles to the east, hovering several hundred feet over
the guard post between the test site and Area 51, a group of men were leaning
out of a helicopter firing semiautomatic weapons at the guards on the ground.

But the bullets in their weapons were blanks, not real ammunition, and the men
in the helicopter were security guards from Wackenhut Security, not enemies of
the state. Wackenhut Security had decided to conduct a mock attack of an access
point to Area 51 to test the system for weaknesses. With astounding lack of
foresight. Wackenhut Security had not bothered to inform the Department of
Energy of their mock-attack plans.

Back at the control point, in Area 6, Richard Mingus’s telephone rang. It was
Pat Williams, the woman in charge of security for the Department of Energy.
“She was real brief,” Mingus says. “She said, ‘It was a test and we didn’t know
about it.’ Then she just hung up.” Mingus was astonished. “Looking back, in all
my years, I have to say it was one of the scariest things I’d ever run into. It was
like kids were running the test site that day.” Mingus didn’t write up any
paperwork on the incident. “I don’t believe I made a note in my record book,” he
says. Instead, Mingus kept working. “We had a nuclear bomb to get down into
its hole and explode.” Test director Joe Behne believes paperwork exists. “I
know it’s in the record. It was not a minor incident,” he says. “For those of us
that were there that day it was almost unbelievable, except we believed [briefly]
it was real—that Ground Zero was being attacked from a warlike enemy. The
incident is bound to be in the logbooks. All kinds of people got calls.”

Far from the test site, things did not return to calm so quickly. The
Department of Energy notified the FBI, who notified the Pentagon and the White
House that Area 51 was under attack. The Navy’s nuclear-armed submarines
were put on alert, which meant that Tomahawk cruise missiles were now
targeting the Nevada Test Site and Area 51. Crisis was averted before things
elevated further, but it was a close call. Troy Wade was at the Pentagon at the
time and told Mingus he “remembers hearing about how high up it went.”

Guards from Wackenhut Security lost their jobs, but like most everything at Area
51, there were no leaks to the press. Only with the publication of this book has
the incident come to light.

The nuclear bomb Mingus was in charge of overseeing was live and not
secured, meaning an actual attack on the test site at that moment would have
raised the possibility of a nuclear weapon being hijacked by an enemy of the
nation. But there was another reason that the nuclear submarines were put on
alert that day: the extremely sensitive nature of a black project the Air Force was
running at Area 51. The top secret aircraft being tested there was the single most
important invention in U.S. airpower since the Army started its aeronautical
division in 1907. Parked on the tarmac at Area 51 was the F-117 Nighthawk, the
nation’s first stealth bomber.

The F-117 would radically change the way America fought wars. As a Lockheed
official explained at a banquet honoring the F-117 in April of 2008, “Before the
advent of stealth, war planners had to determine how many sorties were

necessary to take out a single target. After the invention of the F-117 stealth
bomber, that changed. It became, How many targets can we take out on a single
sortie?”

Lockheed physicist Edward Lovick worked on each rendition of the stealth
bomber, which began in the early 1970s with Harvey, a prototype aircraft named
after the Jimmy Stewart film about an invisible rabbit. Harvey’s stealth qualities
were initially engineered using slide rules and calculators , the same way
Lockheed had developed the A-12 Oxcart. Only with the emergence of the
mainframe computer, in 1974, did those tools become obsolete. “Two Lockheed
engineers, named Denys Overholser and Dick Scherrer, realized that it might be
possible to design a stealth aircraft that would take advantage of some of the
results of a computer’s calculations,” Lovick says. “In 1974 computers were
relatively new and most of them were the size of a car. Our computer at
Lockheed ran on punch cards and had less than 60 K worth of memory.” Still,
the computer could do what humans could not do, and that was endless
calculations.

“The concept behind the computer program involved mirrors reflecting
mirrors,” Lovick explains. Mathematician Bill Schroeder set to work writing
Lockheed’s original computer code, called Echo. If the CIA’s James Jesus
Angleton was correct and the Soviet security forces really were using black
propaganda to create a “wilderness of mirrors” to ensnare the West, the Air
Force was going to create its own set of reflective surfaces to beat the Russians
back with the F-117 stealth bomber. “We designed flat, faceted panels and had
them act like mirrors to scatter radar waves away from the plane,” Lovick says.
“It was a radical idea and it worked.”

The next, on-paper incarnation of the F-117 Nighthawk began in 1974 and
was called the Hopeless Diamond, so named because it resembled the Hope
Diamond and because Lockheed engineers didn’t have much hope it would
actually fly. After the Hopeless Diamond concept went through a series of
redesigns it became a full-scale mock-up of an aircraft and was renamed Have
Blue. T. D. Barnes was the man in charge of radar testing Lockheed’s proof-of-
concept stealth bomber at Area 51. “Lockheed handed it over to us and we put it
up on the pole,” Barnes says. “It was a very weird, very crude-looking thing that
actually looked a lot like the ship from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea. Our job was to look at it from every angle using radar to see how it showed
up on radar.” Radars had advanced considerably since the early days of the Cold
War. “Initially, it was as visible as a big old barn,” says Barnes. So the Have

Blue mock-up was sent back to the Skunk Works for more fine-tuning. Several
months later, a new version of the mock-up arrived at Area 51. “Lockheed had
changed the shape of the aircraft and a lot of the angles of the panels. Once we
put the new mock-up on the pole it appeared to us as something around the size
of a crow.” There was a final round of redesigns, then the airplane came back to
Area 51 again. “We put it up on the pole and all we saw was the pole.” Now it
was time for Lockheed to present the final rendition of the Have Blue to the Air
Force, in hopes of landing the contract to build the nation’s first stealth bomber.

The director of science and engineering at Skunk Works, a man named Ed
Martin, went to Lovick for some advice. “Ed Martin asked me how I thought the
aircraft might appear on enemy radar. I explained that if the Oxcart showed up as
being roughly equivalent to the size of a man, the Have Blue would appear to a
radar like a seven-sixteenth-inch metal sphere— roughly the size of a ball
bearing .” Ed Martin loved Lovick’s analogy. A ball bearing. That was something
a person could relate to. Before Martin left for Washington, DC, Lovick went to
the Lockheed tool shop and borrowed a bag of ball bearings. He wanted Ed
Martin to have a visual reference to share with the Air Force officials there.
“Later, I learned the ball-bearing illustration was so effective that the customers
began rolling the little silvery spheres across the conference table. The analogy
has become legendary, often still used to make an important visual point about
the stealthy F-117 Nighthawk with its high-frequency radar signature that is as
tiny as a ball bearing.” In 1976, Lockheed won the contract. Immediately, they
began manufacturing two Have Blue aircraft in the legendary Skunk Works
Building 82. The man in charge of engineering, fabrication, and assembly of the
pair of stealth bombers was Bob Murphy, the same person who twenty-one years
earlier had begun his career in a pair of overalls at Area 51, working for Kelly
Johnson as chief mechanic on the U-2.

Testing a bomber plane would be a radically different process from testing a
spy plane, and the F-117 was the first bomber to be flight-tested at Area 51.

Most notably, the new bomber would require testing for accuracy in dropping
bombs on targets. For nearly twenty-five years, the CIA and the Air Force had
been flying spy planes and drones in the Box. But there was simply not enough
flat square footage at Groom Lake to drop bombs . There was also the issue of
sound. With multiple projects going on at Area 51, not everyone was cleared for
the F-117.

A second site was needed, and for this, the Air Force turned to the
Department of Energy, formerly the Atomic Energy Commission. A land-use

deal was struck allowing the Air Force to use a preexisting, little-known
bombing range that the Atomic Energy Commission had quietly been using for
decades. It was deep in the desert, within the Connecticut-size Nevada Test and
Training Range. Located seventy miles northwest of Area 51, the Tonopah Test
Range was almost in Death Valley and had been in use as a bombing range and
missile-launch facility for Sandia Laboratories since 1957. The Department of
Energy had no trouble carving a top secret partition out of the 624-square-mile
range for the Air Force’s new bomber project. To be kept entirely off the books,
the secondary black site was named Area 52. Like Area 51, Area 52 has never
been officially acknowledged.

The sparsely populated, high-desert outpost of Tonopah, Nevada, was once
the nation’s most important producer of gold and silver ore. In 1903, eighty-six
million dollars in metals came out of the area’s mines, nearly two billion in 2011
dollars, and at the turn of the century, thirty thousand people rushed to the mile-
high desert city seeking treasure there. Tonopah’s nearest neighbor, the town of
Beatty, where T. D. Barnes lived in the 1960s, became known in 1907 as the
Chicago of the West . For several years the Las Vegas & Tonopah Railroad
maintained a rail line between the two cities, which at one point was the West’s
busiest rail line. And then, almost overnight and like so many towns ensnared in
the gold rush, Tonopah went bust. Within ten years, it was just a few families too
many to be called a ghost town. Even the railroad company ripped up its steel
tracks and carted them away for better use. Packs of wild horses and antelope
came back down from the mountains and began to graze as they had before the
boom, pulling weeds and scrub from the parched desert landscape between the
Cactus and the Kawich mountain ranges. When a group of weaponeers from
Sandia descended upon the area four decades later, in 1956, they were thrilled
with what they found. Tonopah was a perfect place for “secret testing Tthati
could be conducted safely and securely.” Years later, boasting to their corporate
shareholders, the Sandians, as they called themselves, would quote Saint Paul of
Tarsus to sum up their mission at Tonopah Test Range: “test all things; hold fast
that which is good.”

Between 1957 and 1964, Sandia dropped 680 bombs and launched 555
rockets from what was now officially but quietly called the Sandia National
Laboratories’ Outpost at Tonopah. In 1963, Sandia conducted a series of top
secret plutonium-dispersal tests, similar to the Project 57 test that had been
conducted at Groom Lake just a few years earlier. Called Operation Roller
Coaster, three dirty bomb tests were performed to collect biological data on three

hundred animals placed downwind from aerosolized plutonium clouds generated
from three Sandia nuclear weapons. With seven hundred Sandians hard at work
in the desert flats for Operation Roller Coaster, a report called it Sandia’s
“highlight of 1963.” Tonopah was so far removed from the already far removed
and restricted sites at Area 51 and the Nevada Test Site that no one outside a
need-to-know had ever even heard of it.

In October of 1979, construction for an F-117 Nighthawk support facility at
Tonopah began inside Area 52. The facility at Area 51 served as a model for the
facility being built at Area 52. Similarly styled runways and taxiways were built,
as well as a maintenance hangar, using crews already cleared for work on
Nevada Test Site contracts. Sixteen mobile homes were carted in, and several
permanent support buildings were constructed. Sandia didn’t want to draw
attention to the project, so the Air Force officers assigned to the base were
ordered to grow their hair long and to grow beards . Sporting a hippie look, as
opposed to a military look, was less likely to draw unwanted attention to a
highly classified project cropping up in the outer reaches of the Nevada Test
Site. That way, the men could do necessary business in the town of Tonopah.

The two facilities, Area 51 and Area 52, worked in tandem to get the F-117
battle-ready. When the mock attack at the guard gate at Area 51 occurred, in
1982, test flights of the F-117 —which only ever happened at night—were
already in full swing. For some weeks, a debate raged as to how an act of idiocy
by a small group of Wackenhut Security guards nearly outed a billion-dollar
aircraft as well as two top secret military test facilities that had remained secret
for thirty years. An estimated ten thousand personnel had managed to keep the
F-117 program in the dark. There was a collective mopping of the brow and
succinct orders to move on, and then, two years later, the program was nearly
outed again when an Air Force general broke protocol and decided to take a ride
in one of Area 51’s prized MiG fighter jets.

The death of Lieutenant General Robert M, Bond on April 26, 1984, in Area 25
of the Nevada Test Site was an avoidable tragedy. With 267 combat missions
under his belt, 44 in Korea and 213 in Vietnam, Robert M. Bond was a highly
decorated Air Force pilot revered by many. At the time of his accident, he was
vice commander of Air Force Systems Command at Andrews Air Force Base, in
Maryland, which made him a VIP when it came to the F-117 program going on
at Area 51. In March of 1984, General Bond arrived at the secret facility to see

how things were progressing. The general’s visit should have been no different
than those made by the scores of generals whose footsteps Bond was following
in, visits that began back in 1955 with men like General James “Jimmy”

Doolittle and General Curtis LeMay. The dignitaries were always treated in high
style; they would eat, drink, and bear witness to top secret history being made.
Following in this tradition, General Bond’s first visit went without incident. But
in addition to being impressed by the F-117 Nighthawk, General Bond was
equally fascinated by the MiG program, which was still going on at Area 51. In
the fifteen years since the CIA had gotten its hands on Munir Redfa’s MiG-21,
the Agency and the Air Force had acquired a fleet of Soviet-made aircraft
including an MiG-15, an MiG-17, and, most recently, the supersonic MiG-23.
Barnes says, “We called it the Flogger. It was a very fast plane, almost Mach 3.
But it was squirrelly. Hard to fly. It could kill you if you weren’t well trained.”

On a visit to Area 51 the following month, General Bond requested to fly the
MiG-23. “ There was some debate about whether the general should be allowed
to fly,” Barnes explains. “Every hour in a Soviet airplane was precious. We did
not have spare parts. We could not afford unnecessary wear and tear. Usually a
pilot would train for at least two weeks before flying a MiG. Instead, General
Bond got a briefing while sitting inside the plane with an instructor pilot saying,
‘Do this, do that.’” In other words, instead of undergoing two weeks of training,
General Bond pulled rank.

Just a few hours later, General Bond was seated in the cockpit of the MiG,
flying high over Groom Lake. All appeared to be going well, but just as he
crossed over into the Nevada Test Site, Bond radioed the tower on an emergency
channel. “I’m out of control,” General Bond said in distress. The MiG was going
approximately Mach 2.5. “I’ve got to get out, I’m out of control” were the
general’s last words . The MiG had gone into a spin and was on its way down.
Bond ejected from the airplane but was apparently killed when his helmet strap
broke his neck. The general and the airplane crashed into Area 25 at Jackass
Flats, where the land was still highly contaminated from the secret NERVA tests
that had gone on there.

General Bond’s death opened the possible exposure of five secret programs
and facilities, including the MiG program, the F-117 program, Area 51, Area 52,
and the nuclear reactor explosions at Jackass Flats. Unlike the deaths of CIA
pilots flying out of Area 51, which could be concealed as generic training
accidents, the death of a general required detailed explanation. If the press asked
too many questions, it could trigger a federal investigation. One program had to

come out of the dark to keep the others hidden. The Pentagon made the decision
to out the MiG. Quietly, Fred Hoffman, a military writer with the Associated
Press, was “leaked” information that Bond had in fact died at the controls of a
Soviet MiG-23. The emphasis was put on how the Pentagon was able to obtain
Soviet-bloc aircraft and weaponry from allies in Eastern Europe, the Middle
East, and Asia. “The government has always been reluctant to discuss such
acquisitions for fear of embarrassing the friendly donors, but the spotlight was
turned anew on the subject after a three-star Air Force general was killed April
26 in a Nevada plane crash that was quickly cloaked in secrecy,” Hoffman wrote,
adding “sources who spoke on condition they remain anonymous have indicated
the MiG-23, the most advanced Soviet warplane ever to fall permanently into
U.S. hands, was supplied to this country by Egypt.”

With this partial cover, the secrets of Area 51, Area 52, Area 25, and the F-
117 were safe. It would be another four years before the public had any idea the
F-117 Nighthawk existed. In November of 1988, a grainy image of the
arrowhead-shaped, futuristic-looking craft was released to an awestruck public
despite the fact that variations of the F-117 had been flying at Area 51 and Area
52 for eleven years .

By 1974, the Agency had ceded control of Area 51. Some insiders say the
transition occurred in 1979, but since Area 51 does not officially exist, the Air
Force won’t officially say when this handover occurred. Certainly this had to
have happened by the time the stealth bomber program was up and running; the
F-117 program was the holy grail of Pentagon black projects—and, during that
time period, the Air Force dominated Area 51. Having no business in bombs, the
CIA maintained a much smaller presence there than historically it had before.
During the 1970s, the Agency’s work concentrated largely on pilotless aircraft,
or drones. Hank Meierdierck, the man who wrote the manual for the U-2 at Area
51, was in charge of one such CIA drone project, which began in late 1969.
Code-named Aquiline , the six-foot-long pilotless aircraft was disguised to look
like an eagle or buzzard in flight. It carried a small television camera in its nose
and photo equipment and air-sampling sensors under its wings. Some insiders
say it had been designed to test for radiation in the air as well as to gather
electronic intelligence, or ELINT. But Gene Poteat, the first CIA officer ever
assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, offers a different version of
events. “Spy satellites flying over the Caspian Sea delivered us images of an
oddly shaped, giant, multi-engined watercraft moving around down there on the
surface. No one had any idea what this thing was for, but you can be sure the

Agency wanted to find out. That is what the original purpose of Aquiline was
for,” Poteat reveals. “To take close-up pictures of the vehicle so we could discern
what it was and what the Soviets might be thinking of using it for. Since we had
no idea what it was, we made up a name for it. We called it the Caspian Sea
Monster,” Poteat explains. Project Aquiline remains a classified project, but in
September of 2008, BBC News magazine produced a story about a Cold War
Soviet hydrofoil named Ekranopian . which is exactly what the CIA’s Aquiline
drone was designed to spy on.

At Area 51, Hank Meierdierck selected his former hunting partner Jim
Freedman to assist him on the Aquiline drone program. “It flew low and was
meant to follow along communication lines in foreign countries and intercept
messages,” Freedman says. “I believe the plan was to launch it from a submarine
while it was waiting in port.” The Aquiline team consisted of three pilots trained
to remotely control the bird, with Freedman offering operational support. “Hank
got the thing to fly,” Freedman recalls. Progress was slow and “it crash-landed a
lot.” The program ended when the defense contractor, McDonnell Douglas, gave
a bid for the job that Meierdierck felt was ninety-nine million dollars over
budget . McDonnell Douglas would not budge on their bid so Hank
recommended that the CIA cancel Project Aquiline, which he said they did.

After the program was over, Hank Meierdierck managed to take a mock-up of
the Aquiline drone home with him from the area. “He had it sitting on his bar at
his house down in Las Vegas,” Freedman recalls.

Project Aquiline was not the CIA’s first attempt to gather intelligence using
cover from the animal kingdom. Project Ornithopter involved a birdlike drone
designed to blend in with nature by flapping its wings. And a third, even smaller
drone was designed to look like a crow and land on windowsills in order to
photograph what was going on inside CIA-targeted rooms. The tiniest drone
program, orchestrated in the early 1970s, was Project Insectothopter . an insect-
size aerial vehicle that looked like a dragonfly in flight. Insectothopter had an
emerald green minifuselage and, like Ornithopter, flapped its wings, which were
powered by a miniature engine that ran on a tiny amount of gas. Through its
Office of Research and Development, or ORD, the CIA had also tried turning
live birds and cats into spies. In one such program, CIA-trained pigeons flew
around Washington, DC, with bird-size cameras strapped to their necks. The
project failed after the extra weight tired out the pigeons and they hobbled back
to headquarters on foot instead of in flight. Another CIA endeavor, Acoustic
Kitty , involved putting electronic listening devices in house cats. But that project

also backfired after too many cats strayed from their missions in search of food.
One acoustic kitty got mn over by a car. The Agency’s pilotless-vehicle projects
were forever growing in ambition and in size. One robotic drone from the early
1970s, a project financed with DARPA, was disguised to look like an elephant—
ready to do battle in the jungles of Vietnam.

Several projects, like Aquiline, involved only a handful of special-access
personnel. But a few other projects took place on a considerably larger scale. In
July of 1974, the CIA’s Special Activities Division filed a memorandum of
agreement with the Air Force to set up a classified project at Area 51 that was
extensive enough that it required five hangars of its own. Aerospace historian
Peter Merlin, who wrote monographs for NASA, explains: “The top-secret
project, with a classified code-name, was expected to last about one year. Six
permanent personnel were assigned to the test site, with up to 20 personnel on
site during peak periods of short duration activity.” The Air Force designated
Hangar 13 through Hangar 17, located at the south end of the facility, as CIA-
only. What mysterious project the CIA was working on there, those without a
need-to-know have no idea. The work remains classified; rumor is that it was a
Mach 5 or Mach 6 drone.

Some operations at Groom Lake in the 1970s involved the Agency’s desire to
detect facilities for weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, including
bioweapons and chemical weapons, before those weapons facilities were in full-
production mode. This work, the CIA felt, could ideally be performed by laying
sensors on the ground that were capable of “sniffing” the air. Since the 1950s,
the Agency had been advancing its use of sensor drones to detect WMD
signatures by monitoring changes in the air, the soil, and an area’s energy
consumption. Early efforts had been made using U-2 pilots , who had to leave the
safety of high-altitude flight and get down dangerously low in order to shoot
javelinlike sensors into the earth. But those operations, part of Operation
Tobasco. risked exposure . Several U-2 pilots had already been shot down.
Because these delicate sensors needed to be accurately placed very close in to
the WMD-producing facilities, it was an ideal job for a stealthy, low-flying
drone.

Decades before anyone had rekindled an interest in drones, the CIA saw
endless possibilities in them. But to advance drone technology required money,
and in 1975, a Senate committee investigating illegal activity inside the CIA,
chaired by Senator Frank Church and known as the Church Committee, did
considerable damage to the Agency’s reputation as far as the general public was

concerned. Budgets were thinned. During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, which
began in 1977, CIA discretionary budgets were at an all-time low, and the CIA
didn’t get very far with its drones—until late 1979, when the Agency learned
about a lethal anthrax accident at a “ probable biological warfare research ,
production and storage installation” in Sverdlovsk, Russia—the same location
where Gary Powers had been taking spy photographs when his U-2 was shot
down nineteen years before. As a result of the Sverdlovsk bioweapons accident,
the CIA determined that as many as a hundred people had died from inhaling
anthrax spores. The incident gave the CIA’s drone program some legs. But
without interest from the Air Force, drones were perceived largely as the
Agency’s playthings.

For twenty-five years, from 1974 to 1999, the CIA and the Air Force rarely
worked together on drone projects at Area 51. This lack of cooperation was
evident, and succinctly summed up in an interview Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates gave Time magazine in April of 2008. Gates said that when he was
running the CIA, in 1992, he discovered that “the Air Force would not co-fund
with CIA a vehicle without a pilot.” That changed in the winter of 2000, when
the two organizations came together to work on a new drone project at Area 51,
one that would forever change the face of warfare and take both agencies toward
General Henry “Hap” Arnold’s Victory Over Japan Day prediction that one day
in the future, wars would be fought by aircraft without pilots sitting inside. In the
year 2000, that future was now.

The project involved retrofitting a CIA reconnaissance drone, called Predator,
with antitank missiles called Hellfire missiles , supplied by the army. The target
would be a shadowy and obscure terrorist the CIA was considering for
assassination. He lived in Afghanistan, and his name was Osama bin Laden .

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Revelation

It was January of 2001, nine months before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the
director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Cofer Black, had a serious
problem. The CIA had been considering assassinating Osama bin Laden with the
Predator, but until that point, the unmanned aerial vehicle had been used for
reconnaissance only, not targeted assassination. Because two technologies
needed to be merged—the flying drone and the laser-guided precision missile
— engineers and aerodvnamicists had concerns . Specifically, they worried that
the propulsion from the missile might send the drone astray or the missile off
course. And the CIA needed a highly precise weapon with little possibility of
collateral damage. The public would perceive killing a terrorist one way, but
they would likely perceive killing that terrorist’s neighbors in an altogether
different light. This new weaponized drone technology was tested at Area 51; the
development program remains classified. After getting decent results, both the
CIA and the Air Force were confident that the missiles unleashed from the drone
could reach their targets.

Along came another hurdle to overcome, one that was unfolding not in the
desert but in Washington, DC. The newly elected administration of President
George W. Bush realized that it had no policy when it came to taking out
terrorists with drones. Osama bin Laden was known to be the architect of the
1998 U.S. embassy suicide bombings in East Africa, which killed more than 225
people, including Americans. He masterminded the suicide bombing of the USS
Cole and had officially declared war against the United States. But targeted
assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal , per President Ronald
Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, and since the situation required serious

examination, State Department lawyers got involved.

There was one avenue to consider in support of the targeted-killing operation,
and that was the fact that the FBI had a bounty on the man’s head. By February
of 2001, the State Department gave the go-ahead for the assassination. Then
State Department lawyers warned the CIA of another problem, the same one that
had originally sent the Predator drone to Area 51 for field tests; namely, potential
collateral damage. The State Department needed to know how many bin Laden
family members and guests staying on the compound the CIA was targeting
could be killed in a drone attack. Bin Laden’s compound was called Tarnak
Farm, and a number of high-profile Middle Eastern royal family members were
known to visit there.

To determine collateral damage, the CIA and the Air Force teamed up for an
unusual building project on the outer reaches of Area 51 . They engineered a full-
scale mock-up of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan on which to test
the results of a drone strike. But while engineers were at work, CIA director
George Tenet decided that taking out Osama bin Laden with a Hellfire missile-
equipped Predator drone would be a mistake. This was a decision the CIA would
come to regret.

Immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Pentagon
knew that it needed drones to help fight the war on terror, which meant it needed
help from the CIA. For decades, the Air Force had been thumbing its nose at
drones. The pride of the Air Force had always been pilots, not robots. But the
CIA had been researching, developing, and advancing drone technology at Area
51 for decades. The CIA had sent drones on more than six hundred
reconnaissance missions in the Bosnian conflict, beginning in 1995. CIA drones
had provided intelligence for NATO forces in the 1999 Kosovo air campaign,
collecting intelligence, searching for targets, and keeping an eye on Kosovar-
Albanian refuge camps. The CIA Predator had helped war planners interpret the
chaos of the battlefield there. Now, the Air Force needed the CIA’s help going
into Afghanistan with drones.

The first reconnaissance drone mission in the war on terror was flown over
Kabul, Afghanistan, just one week after 9/11, on September 18, 2001. Three
weeks later, the first Hellfire-equipped Predator drone was flown over Kandahar.
The rules of aerial warfare had changed overnight. America’s stealth bombers
were never going to locate Osama bin Laden and his top commanders hiding out
in mountain compounds. Now pilotless drones would be required to seek out and
assassinate the most wanted men in the world.

Although drones had been developed and tested at Area 51, Area 52, and
Indian Springs for nearly fifty years, the world at large would come to learn
about them only in November of 2002, when a drone strike in Yemen made
headlines around the world. Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi was a wanted man. A
citizen of Yemen and a senior al-Qaeda operative, al-Harethi had also been
behind the planning and bombing of the USS Cole two years before. On the
morning of November 2, 2002, al-Harethi and five colleagues drove through the
vast desert expanse of Yemen’s northwest province Marib oblivious to the fact
that they were being watched by eyes in the skies in the form of a Predator drone
flying several miles above them.

The Predator launched its missile at the target and landed a direct hit. The al-
Qaeda operatives and the vehicle were instantly reduced to a black heap of
burning metal. It was an assassination plot straight out of a Tom Clancy novel,
except that it was so real and so dramatic—the first visual proof that al-Qaeda
leaders could be targeted and killed—that Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz began bragging about the Hellfire strike to CNN. The drone attack in
Yemen was “a very successful tactical operation.” Wolfowitz said. Except it was
supposed to be a quiet, unconfirmed assassination. Wolfowitz’s bravado made
Yemen upset. Brigadier General Yahya M. A1 Mutawakel, the deputy secretary
general for the People’s Congress Party in Yemen, gave an exclusive interview
to the Christian Science Monitor explaining that the Pentagon had broken a
secrecy agreement between the two nations. “This is why it is so difficult to
make deals with the United States,” A1 Mutawakel explained. “They don’t
consider the internal circumstances in Yemen. In security matters, you don’t
want to alert the enemy.”

Yemen pushed back against the United States by outing the secret inner
workings of the operation. It was the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Edmund Hull,
an employee of the State Department, who had masterminded the plot, officials
in Yemen explained. Hull had spearheaded the intelligence-gathering efforts, a
job more traditionally reserved for the CIA. Hull spoke Arabic . He had roots in
the country and knew people who knew local tribesmen in the desert region of
Marib. The State Department, Yemen claimed, was the agency that had bribed
local tribesmen into handing over information on al-Harethi, which allowed the
CIA to know exactly where the terrorist would be driving and when. Revealing
Ambassador Hull to be the central organizing player in the drone strike exposed
the Department of State as having a hand in not just the espionage game but
targeted assassination as well. Surprisingly, little fuss was made about any of

this, despite the fact that diplomats are supposed to avoid assassination plots.

In political circles, Ambassador Hull was greatly embarrassed. He refused to
comment on his role in what signaled a sea change in U.S. military assets with
wings. The 2002 drone strike in Yemen was the first of its kind in the war on
terror, but little did the public know that hundreds more drone strikes would soon
follow. The next one went down the very next week, when a Predator targeted
and killed al-Qaeda’s number-three, Mohammed Atef. in Jalabad. Afghanistan .
As the war on terror progressed, some drone strikes would be official while
others would go unmentioned. But never again would the CIA or the State
Department admit to having a hand in any of them. When Mohammed Atef was
killed, initial reports said a traditional bomber aircraft had targeted and destroyed
Atef’s home. Only later was the strike revealed as being the work of a Predator
drone and a targeted assassination spearheaded by the CIA .

Almost everything that has happened at Area 51 since 1968 remains classified
but it is generally understood among men who formerly worked there that once
the war on terror began, flight-testing new drones at Area 51 and Area 52 moved
full speed ahead. This new way of conducting air strikes, from an aircraft
without a pilot inside, represented a fundamental reconfiguration of the U.S. Air
Force fighting force and would continue to remain paramount to Air Force
operations going forward. This meant that a major element of the drone program,
i.e., the CIA’s role in overhead, needed to return quietly and quickly into the
“black.” The Air Force has a clear-cut role in wartime. But the operations of the
CIA, a clandestine organization at its core, can never be overtly defined in real
time. Remarkably, after nearly fifty years, the CIA and the Air Force were back
in the business of overhead, and they would model their partnership on the early
spy plane projects at Area 51. As the war on terror expanded, budgets for drone
programs went from thin to virtually limitless almost overnight. As far as
developing weapons using cutting-edge science and technology was concerned,
it was 1957 post-Sputnik all over again.

No longer used only for espionage, the Predator got a new designation .
Previously it had been the RQ-1 Predator: R for reconnaissance and Q indicating
unmanned. Immediately after the Yemen strike, the Predator became the MQ-1
Predator, with the M now indicating its multirole use. The company that built the
Predator was General Atomics, the same group that was going to launch Ted
Taylor’s ambitious spaceship to Mars, called Orion, from Jackass Flats back in

1958.

A second Predator, originally called the Predator B, was also coming online.
Described by Air Force officials as “the Predator’s younger, yet larger and
stronger brother,” it too needed a new name. The Reaper fit perfectly: the
personification of death. “One of the big differences between the Reaper and the
Predator is the Predator can only carry about 200 pounds [of weapons]. The
Reaper, however, can carry one and a half tons, and on top of carrying Hellfire
missiles, can carry multiple GBU-12 laser-guided bombs,” said Captain Michael
Lewis of the Forty-second Wing at Creech Air Force Base. The General Atomics
drones were single-handedly changing the relationship between the CIA and the
Air Force. The war on terror had the two services working together again,
exactly as had happened with the advent of the U-2. This was not simply a
coincidence or a recurring moment in time. Rather it was the symbiotic reality of
war. If the CIA and the Air Force are rivals in peacetime—fighting over money,
power, and control—in war, they work together like a bow and arrow. Each
organization has something critical the other service does not have. The CIA’s
drones could now give Air Force battlefield commanders visual images from
which they could target individuals in real time. Now, intelligence capabilities
and military could work seamlessly together as one. Which is exactly what
happened next, as the war on terror widened to include Iraq.

On the night of March 29, 2004, an MQ-1 Predator drone surveilling the area
outside the U.S. Balad Air Base in northern Iraq caught sight of three men
digging a ditch in the road with pickaxes. Brigadier General Frank Gorenc was
remotely viewing the events in real time from an undisclosed location
somewhere in the Middle East. He watched the men as they placed an
improvised explosive device, or IED, in the hole. Gorenc was able to identify
that the men were burying an IED in the road because the resolution of the
images relayed back from the Predator’s reconnaissance camera was so precise,
Gorenc could see wires. Gorenc and other commanders in Iraq knew what the
Predator was capable of. Gorenc described this technology as allowing him to
“put a weapon on a target within minutes.” and he authorized a strike. The
Predator operator, seated at a console next to Gorenc, launched a Hellfire missile
from the Predator’s weapons bay, killing all three of the men in a single strike.
“This strike,” explained Gorenc, “should send a message to our enemies that
we’re watching you, and we will take action against you any time, day or night,

if you continue to stand in the way of progress in Iraq.” Eyes in the sky, dreamed
up in the 1940s, had become swords in the sky in the new millennium.
Reconnaissance and retaliation had merged into one.

Simultaneous with the early drone strikes in Iraq, the CIA and the Air Force
had begun comanaging a covert program to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban
commanders in the tribal areas in the northwest of Pakistan, on Afghanistan’s
border, using drones. To get the program up and running required effort, just as
the U-2 and the Oxcart had. A drone wing, like a U-2 detachment or a squadron
of Oxcarts, involved building more Predators and Reapers, training drone pilots,
creating an Air Force wing, building secret bases in the Middle East, hooking up
satellites, and resolving other support-related issues. From 2003 to 2007 the
number of drone strikes rose incrementally, little by little, each year. Only in
2008 did the drones really come online. During that year, which included the last
three weeks of the Bush administration, there were thirty-six drone strikes in
Pakistan, which the Air Force said killed 268 al-Qaeda and Taliban. By 2009 the
number of drone strikes would rise to fifty-three . Since the Air Force does not
release numbers, and the CIA does not comment on being involved, those
numbers are approximate best guesses, put together by journalists and
researchers based on local reports. Since journalists are not allowed in many
parts of the tribal areas in Pakistan, the actual number of drone strikes is
unknown.

As much publicity as drones are getting today, there is a lot more going on in
the skies than the average citizen comprehends. According to T. D. Barnes,
“There are at least fifteen satellites and an untold number of Air Force aircraft
‘parked’ over Iraq and Afghanistan, providing twenty-four-hour-a-day coverage
for airmen and soldiers on the ground. The Air Force is currently flying
surveillance with the U-2, Predator, MQ-9 Reaper, and Global Hawk. These are
just the assets we know about . Having been in the business, I would expect we
have surveillance capability being used that we won’t know about for years.”

The majority of these platforms, all classified, are “in all probability” being built
and tested at Area 51, says Barnes.

In April of 2009, reporters with a French aviation newspaper published
drawings of a reconnaissance drone seen flying over Afghanistan. With its long
wings, lack of tail, and two wheels under its belly in a line, like on a bicycle,
what became known as the Beast of Kandahar looks reminiscent of the Horten
brothers’ flying wing of 1944. What was this new drone built for? It seemed not
to have a weapons bay. Eight months later, in December of 2009, the Defense

Department confirmed the existence of the drone, which the Air Force calls the
RQ-170 Sentinel. Built by Lockheed Skunk Works and tested at Area 51 and
Area 52, the newest drone appears to be for reconnaissance purposes only. As
such, it follows in the footsteps of the U-2 and the A-12 Oxcart, comanaged by
the Air Force and the CIA at Area 51. Save for its name, all details remain
classified. It is likely flying over denied territory, including Iran, North Korea,
China, and Russia. Fifty-five years after Richard Bissell set Area 51 as a secret
place to test-fly the nation’s first peacetime spy planes, new aircraft continue to
be built with singular design and similar intention. Despite the incredible
advances in science and technology, the archetypal need for reconnaissance
remains.

Quick and adaptable, twenty-first-century surveillance requirements means
the future of overhead lies in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. The overhead
intelligence take once provided by CIA spy pilots like Gary Powers, Ken
Collins, Frank Murray, and others now belongs to remotely piloted drones. The
old film cameras, which relied on clear skies, have been replaced by state-of-the-
art imaging systems developed by Sandia and Raytheon, called synthetic
aperture radar, or SAR . These “cameras” relay real-time images shot through
smoke, dust, and even clouds, during the day or in the dark of night. But as
omnipotent and all-seeing as the drones may appear, there is one key element
generally overlooked by the public—but certainly not by the Pentagon or the
CIA—when considering the vulnerability of the Air Force’s most valuable asset
with wings. Drones require satellite links.

To operate a drone requires ownership in space. All unmanned aerial vehicles
require satellites to relay information to and from the pilots who operate the
drones via remote control. As the Predator flies over the war theater in the
Middle East, it is being operated by a pilot sitting in a chair thirty miles south of
Area 51. at Indian Springs . The pilot is seated in front of a computer screen that
provides a visual representation of what the Predator is looking at on the ground
in the battlefield halfway across the world. Two sensor operators sit beside the
pilot, each working like a copilot might have in another age. The pilot and the
sensor operators rely on a team of fifty-five airmen for operational support. The
Predator Primary Satellite Link is the name of the system that allows
communication between the drone and the team. The drone needs only to be in
line of sight with its ground-control station when it lands. Everything else the
drone can do, from capture images to fire missiles, it does thanks to its satellite
link.

Indian Springs is the old airstrip where Dr. Edward Teller, father of the H-
bomb, and all the other nuclear physicists used to land when they would come to
witness their atomic bomb creations being set off as tests from 1951 to 1992.
Indian Springs is where the atomic-sampling pilots trained to fly through
mushroom clouds. It is where EG&G set up the first radar-testing facility on the
Nevada Test and Training Range in 1954. Indian Springs is where Bob Lazar
said he was taken and debriefed after getting caught trespassing on Groom Lake
Road. And in 2011, Indian Springs, which has been renamed Creech Air Force
Base, is the place where Air Force pilots sit in war rooms operating drones.

For the Department of Defense, the vulnerability of space satellites to
sabotage has created a new and unprecedented threat. According to a 2008 study
on “Wicked Problems” prepared by the Defense Science Board, in a chapter
significantly entitled “Surprise in Space,” the board outlines the vulnerability of
space satellites in today’s world. By the Pentagon’s definition, “Wicked
problems are highly complex, wide-ranging problems that have no definitive
formulation... and have no set solution.” By their very nature, wicked problems
are “substantially without precedent,” meaning the outcome of them cannot be
known because a wicked problem is one that has never before been solved.

Worst of all, warned the Pentagon, efforts to solve wicked problems generally
give way to an entirely new set of problems. The individual tasked with keeping
abreast of the wicked problem is called a wicked engineer, someone who must
be prepared to be surprised and be able to deal with unintended consequences
because “playing the game changes the game,”

By relying on satellites to fight the war on terror as well as many of the
foreseeable conflicts in the immediate future, the single greatest wicked problem
facing the Pentagon in the twenty-first century is the looming threat of the
militarization of space. To weaponize space, historical thinking in the Pentagon
goes, would be to safeguard space in a preemptive manner. A war in space over
satellite control is not a war the United States necessarily wants to fight, but it is
a war the United States is most assuredly unwilling to lose.

“Over eighty percent of the satellite communications used in U.S. Central
Command’s area of responsibility is provided by commercial vendors,” reads the
Pentagon’s “Surprise in Space” report. And when, in 2007, the Chinese—
unannounced and unexpectedly— shot down one of their own satellites with one
of their own weapons, the incident opened the Pentagon’s eyes to a whole host
of potential wicked-problem scenarios in space.

Around 5:00 p.m. eastern standard time on July 11, 2007, a small, six-foot-

long Chinese satellite was circling the Earth 539 miles up when it was targeted
and destroyed by a Chinese ballistic missile launched from a mobile launcher at
the Songlin test facility in Szechuan Province, running on solid fuel and topped
with a “kinetic kill vehicle,” or explosive device. The satellite was traveling at
speeds of around sixteen thousand miles per hour, and the ballistic missile was
traveling approximately eighteen thousand miles per hour. The hit was dead-on.
As radical and impressive as it sounds, the technology was not what raised flags
and eyebrows at the Pentagon. The significance of the event came from the fact
that with China’s satellite kill, the world moved one dangerous step closer to the
very wicked problem of weaponizing space. To enter into that game means
entering into the kind of mutual-assured-destruction military industrial-complex
madness that has not been engaged in since the height of the Cold War.

Actions of this magnitude, certainly by those of a superpower like China, are
almost always met by the U.S. military with a response, either overt or veiled,
and the Chinese satellite kill was no exception. Seven months later, in February
of 2008, an SM-3 Raytheon missile was launched off the deck of the US S Lake
Erie in the North Pacific. It traveled approximately 153 miles up into space
where it hit a five-thousand-pound U.S. satellite described as being about the
size of a school bus and belonging to the National Reconnaissance Office. The
official Pentagon story was that the satellite had gone awry and the United States
didn’t want the satellite’s hazardous fuel source, stated to be the toxin hydrazine,
to crash on foreign soil. “Our objective was to intercept the satellite, reduce the
mass that might survive re-entry [and] vector that mass into unpopulated areas
ideally the ocean,” General James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, told the press. International leaders cried foul, saying the test
was designed to show the world that the United States has the technology to take
out other nations’ satellites. “China is continuously following closely the
possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant
countries,” declared Liu Jianchao, China’s foreign ministry spokesman—
certainly an example of the pot calling the kettle black.

In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union actually considered
using space as a launching pad for war. President Eisenhower’s science adviser
James Killian—a man with so much power that he was not required to tell the
truth to Congress —fielded regular suggestions from the Pentagon to develop, in
his own words, “satellite bombers, military bases on the moon, and so on.”
Killian was the man who spearheaded the first nuclear weapon explosions in
space, first in the upper atmosphere (Orange), then near the ozone layer (Teak),

and finally in outer space (Argus). But Killian shied away from the idea of
weaponizing space not because he saw putting weapons in space as an inherently
reckless or existentially bad idea but because Killian believed nuclear weapons
would not work well from space.

“A satellite cannot simply drop a bomb.” Killian declared in a public service
announcement released from the White House on March 26, 1958, a report
written for “nontechnical” people at the behest of the president. “An object
released from a satellite doesn’t fall. So there is no special advantage in being
over the target,” Killian declared. Here was James Killian, who, by his own
admission, was not a scientist , explaining to Americans why dropping bombs
from space wouldn’t work. “Indeed the only way to 'drop’ a bomb directly down
from a satellite is to carry out aboard the satellite a rocket launching of the
magnitude required for an intercontinental missile.” In other words, Killian was
saying that to get an ICBM up to a launchpad in space was simply too
cumbersome a process. Killian believed that the better way to put a missile on a
target was to launch it from the ground. That the extra effort to get missiles in
space wasn’t worth the task. This may have been true in the 1950s, but decades
later James Killian would be proven wrong.

Flash forward to 2011. Analysts with the United States Space Surveillance
Network , which is located in an Area 51-like facility on the island of Diego
Garcia in the Indian Ocean, spend all day, every day, 365 days a year, tracking
more than eight thousand man-made objects orbiting the Earth. The USSS
Network is responsible for detecting, tracking, cataloging, and identifying
artificial objects orbiting Earth, including active and inactive satellites, spent
rocket bodies, and space debris. After the Chinese shot down their own satellite
in 2007, the network’s job got considerably more complicated. The Chinese
satellite kill produced an estimated thirty-five thousand pieces of one-centimeter-
wide debris and another fifteen hundred pieces that were ten centimeters or
more. “ A one-centimeter object is very hard to track but can do considerable
damage if it collides with any spacecraft at a high rate of speed,” said Laura
Grego, a scientist with the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned
Scientists. The United States said the NRO satellite it shot down did not create
space debris because, being close to Earth when it was shot down, its pieces
burned up as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere.

These scenarios create another wicked problem for the U.S. military. Every
modern nation relies on satellites to function. The synchronized encryption
systems used by banks around the world rely on satellites. Weather forecasts are

derived from satellite information, as is the ability of air traffic controllers to
keep airplanes safely aloft. The U.S. global positioning system, or GPS, works
on satellites, as will the European version of GPS, the Galileo positioning
system, which will come online in 2012. The U.S. military relies on satellites not
just for its drone programs but for almost all of its military communications
worldwide. Were anyone to take down the satellite system, or even just a part of
it, the world would see chaos and panic that would make The War of the Worlds
seem tame. When considering the actions of the United States and the Soviet
Union during the atomic buildup of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—the nuclear
hubris, the fiscal waste, and the imprudent public policy—it is nothing short of
miraculous that the space-based nuclear tests of the late 1950s and early 1960s
did not propel the two superpowers to fight for military control of space. Instead,
in the last decades of the Cold War, the United States and the USSR worked with
a tacit understanding that space was off-limits for warfare. Neither nation tried to
put missiles on the moon. And neither nation shot down another nation’s spy
satellites. According to Colonel Leghorn, this is because “ spy satellites launched
into space were accepted as eyes in the skies that governments had to live with.”
The governments Leghorn is referring to are Russia and the United States. But
today, allegiances and battle lines have been considerably redrawn. At least one
enemy army, that of al-Qaeda, would rather die than live according to the
superpowers’ rules.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, his ninety-one years, Leghorn speaks with
great authority. In addition to being considered the father of aerial
reconnaissance, Leghorn founded the Itek Corporation in 1960, which developed
the high-resolution photographic system for America’s first reconnaissance
satellite, Corona. The Corona program was highly successful and, most notably,
was originally designed and run by Richard Bissell for the CIA at the same time
he was in charge of operations at Area 51. After leaving the Air Lorce, Leghorn
spent decades in the commercial-satellite business . Lrom the satellite images
produced by Itek satellites, the CIA learned that in order to escape scrutiny by
America’s eyes in the sky, many foreign governments moved their most secret
military facilities underground.

Out in the Nevada desert, while the CIA redoubled its efforts at Area 51 to
develop ground sensor technology and infrared tracking techniques to learn more
about underground facilities (which also requires the use of drones), the

Department of Defense and the Air Force got to work on a different approach. In
the 1980s, the military worked to develop the bunker buster, a nuclear weapon
designed to fire deep into Earth’s surface, hit underground targets, and detonate
belowground. Weapons designer Sandia was brought on board. It was called the
W61 Earth Penetrator . and testing took place at Area 52 in 1988. The idea was to
launch the earth-penetrator weapon from forty thousand feet above but after
many tests (minus the nuclear warhead), it became clear that a nuclear bomb
would have little or no impact on granite, which is the rock of choice in which to
build sensitive sites underground. After President Clinton ended all U.S. nuclear
testing in 1993 (the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was adopted by the
United Nations General Assembly in 1996 and signed by five of the then seven
or eight nuclear-capable countries !, the idea of developing an earth-penetrating
nuclear weapon lost its steam. But the building of underground facilities by
foreign governments continued to plague war planners, so along came a
nonnuclear space-based weapons project called Rods from God . That weapons
project involved slender metal rods, thirty feet long and one foot in diameter,
that could be launched from a satellite in space and hit a precise target on Earth
at ten thousand miles per second. T. D. Barnes says “ that’s enough force to take
out Iran’s nuclear facility, or anything like it, in one or two strikes.” The
Federation of American Scientists reported that a number of similar “long-rod
penetration” programs are believed to currently exist.

After the Gulf War, DARPA hired a secretive group called the JASON
scholars (a favored target in conspiracy-theorist circles) and its parent company,
MITRE Corporation, to report on the status of underground facilities, which in
government nomenclature are referred to as UGFs. The unclassified version of
the April 1999 report begins, “Underground facilities are being used to conceal
and protect critical activities that pose a threat to the United States.” These
threats, said JASON, “include the development and storage of weapons of mass
destruction, principally nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons,” and also that
“the proliferation of such facilities is a legacy of the Gulf War.” What this means
is that the F-117 stealth bomber showed foreign governments “that almost any
above ground facility is vulnerable to attack and destruction by precision guided
weapons.” For DARPA, this meant it was time to develop a new nuclear bunker
buster—Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty or not.

In January of 2001, the Federation of American Scientists reported their
concern over the disclosure that the nuclear weapons laboratories were working
on low-yield nukes, or “mini-nukes,” to target underground facilities despite the

congressional ban against “research and development which could lead to the
production by the United States of a new, low-yield nuclear weapon.” Los
Alamos fired back , claiming they could develop a mini-nuke conceptually. “One
could design and deploy a new set of nuclear weapons that do not require
nuclear testing to be certified,” stated Los Alamos associate director for nuclear
weapons Stephen M. Younger, asserting that “such simple devices would be
based on a very limited nuclear test database.” The Federation of American
Scientists saw Younger’s assertion as improbable: “It seems unlikely that a
warhead capable of performing such an extraordinary mission as destroying a
deeply buried and hardened bunker could be deployed without full-scale
[nuclear] testing” first. On July 1, 2006, Stephen Younger became president of
National Security Technologies, or NSTec, the company in charge of operations
at the Nevada Test Site , through 2012.

In 2002, with America again at war, the administration of George W. Bush
revived the development of the nuclear bunker-buster weapon, now calling it the
Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. In April of the same year, the Department of
Defense entered into discussions with the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory to begin preliminary design work on the new nuclear weapon. By
fiscal year 2003, the Stockpile Services Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator line
item received $14.5 million; in 2004 another $7.5 million; and in 2005 yet
another $27.5 million. In 2006. the Senate dropped the line item . Either the
program was canceled or it got a new name and entered into the black world—
perhaps at Area 51 and Area 52.

Or perhaps next door at the Nevada Test Site, underground. For as far-fetched
and ironic as this sounds—developing a bunker-busting nuclear bomb at an
underground nuclear testing facility in Nevada—this is exactly what DOE
officials proposed in an unclassified report released quietly in 2005. In this
report, officials with the agency formerly known as the Atomic Energy
Commission proposed to revive the NERVA program —the Area 25 nuclear-
powered rocket program designed to send man to Mars—and to do it, of all
places, underground.

Unlike the NERVA program of the 1960s, argued Michael Williams, the
author of the report, “DOE Ground Test facilities for space exploration enabling
nuclear technologies can no longer be vented to the open atmosphere,” meaning
a facility like the one that previously existed out at Jackass Flats was out of the
question. But for the new NERVA project, Williams proposed, the Department of
Energy could easily conduct its nuclear tests inside “the existing [underground]

tunnels or new tunnels at the Nevada Test site for this purpose.”

Former Los Alamos associate director of nuclear weapons Stephen Younger,
who currently serves as the president of operations at the Nevada Test Site,
categorically denies that any underground nuclear weapons tests are in the works
at the test site. But he does confirm that “subcritical” nuclear tests currently take
place there, inside an underground tunnel complex located beneath Area 1. To
access that facility, Younger says, employees use an elevator that travels a
thousand feet underground. What goes on there are “scientific experiments with
plutonium and high explosives,” Younger says, “not weapons tests.” Younger
insists the “same cannot be said about the Russians.” He says that inside their
underground facility at Novaya Zemlya—the location where the Soviet Union
detonated their fifty-megaton thermonuclear bomb, called Tsar Bomba, in 1961
—“the Russians are developing new nuclear weapons around the clock. Mr.
[Vladimir] Putin has said that repeatedly. He keeps saying that because they
want us to know.”

There is no way to know precisely what is happening today at the Nevada
Test and Training Range—aboveground at Area 51 or Area 52, or in the
underground tunnels beneath the test site, because most of what is currently
happening out in the Nevada desert is classified and the federal agencies
involved believe the people do not have a need-to-know. The question is, does
the public have a right to know? Does Congress? Many secret projects that have
gone on at Area 51 have delivered results that have kept America safe. The first
flight over the Soviet Union, by Hervey Stockman in a U-2 spy plane in 1956,
provided the CIA with critical intelligence, namely, that the Russians were not
lining up their military machine for a sneak attack. The intelligence provided by
an A-12 Oxcart spy plane mission kept the Johnson administration from
declaring war on North Korea during the Vietnam War. The F-117 stealth
bomber crippled Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs. But there are other kinds of
secret actions that have gone on at Area 51, at least one of which should never
have been authorized and should not be kept as a national secret anymore.

After World War II, the American government’s hiring and protection of Nazi
scientists was based on the premise that these scientists were the world’s best
and their information was needed in order to advance science—and win the next
war. In doing so, America made a deal with the devil. This deal became a wicked
problem for the agencies involved, and playing the game with former Nazis gave
way to an entirely new set of problems, one of which has been the federal
government’s ongoing complicity in covering up many of these scientists’

original crimes. Approximately six hundred million pages of information about
the government’s postwar use of Nazi criminals’ expertise remains classified as
of 2011. Many documents about Area 51 exist in that pile .

The reason why the federal government will not officially admit that Area 51
exists is not the secret spy planes, the stealth bombers, or the drones that were,
and still are, flight-tested there. The reason is something else. It is a program
undertaken by five EG&G engineers at Area 51. This program involved the
Roswell crash remains and predated the development of the original CIA facility,
currently called Area 51, which was built by Richard Bissell beginning in 1955.
Area 51 is named as such not because it was a randomly chosen quadrant, as has
often been presumed, but because the 1947 crash remains from Roswell, New
Mexico, were sent from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base out to a secret spot in
the Nevada desert—in 1951.

The gypsies have a saying: You’re not really dead until the last person who
knows you dies. For investigative journalists it goes something like this: As long
as there is an eyewitness willing to tell the truth, the truth can be known.

The flying craft that crashed in New Mexico, the myth of which has come to
be known as the Roswell Incident, happened in 1947, sixty-four years before the
publication of this book. Everyone directly involved in that incident—who acted
on behalf of the government—is apparently dead. Fike it does about Area 51, the
U.S. government refuses to admit the Roswell crash ever happened, but it did—
according to the seminal testimony of one man interviewed over the course of
eighteen months for this book. He participated in the engineering project that
came about as a result of the Roswell Incident. He was one of the elite engineers
from EG&G who were tasked with the original Area 51 wicked engineering
problem.

In July of 1947, Army intelligence spearheaded the efforts to retrieve the
remains of the flying disc that crashed at Roswell. And as with other stories that
have become the legends of Area 51, part of the conspiracy theory about
Roswell has its origins in truth. The crash did reveal a disc, not a weather
balloon, as has subsequently been alleged by the Air Force. And responders from
the Roswell Army Air Field found not only a crashed craft, but also two crash
sites, and they found bodies alongside the crashed craft. These were not aliens.
Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs. Unusually
petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall.
Physically, the bodies of the aviators revealed anatomical conundrums. They
were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had

unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes. One fact was clear:
these children, if that’s what they were, were not healthy humans. A second fact
was shocking. Two of the child-size aviators were comatose but still alive.

Everything related to the crash site was sent to Wright Field, later called
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio, where it all remained until 1951. That
is when the evidence was packed up and transported to the Nevada Test Site. It
was received, physically, by the elite group of EG&G engineers. The Atomic
Energy Commission, not the Air Force and not the Central Intelligence Agency,
was put in charge of the Roswell crash remains. According to its unusual charter,
the Atomic Energy Commission was the organization best equipped to handle a
secret that could never be declassified. The Atomic Energy Commission needed
engineers they could trust to handle the work that was about to begin. For this,
they looked to the most powerful defense contractor in the nation that no one had
ever heard of—EG&G.

The engineers with EG&G were chosen to receive the crash remains and to
set up a secret facility just outside the boundary of the Nevada Test Site, sixteen
miles to the northwest of Groom Lake, approximately five and a half miles north
of the northernmost point where Area 12 and Area 15 meet. A facility this
remote would never be visited by anyone outside a small group with a strict
need-to-know and would never have to be accounted for or appear on any
official Nevada Test Site map. These five men were told there was more
engineering work to be done, and that they would be the only five individuals
with a set of keys to the facility. The project, the men were told, was the most
clandestine, most important engineering program since the Manhattan Project,
which was why the man who had been in charge of that one would function as
the director of this project as well.

Vannevar Bush had been President Roosevelt’s most trusted science adviser
during World War II. He held engineering doctorates from both Harvard
University and MIT, in addition to being the former vice president and former
dean of engineering at MIT . The decisions Vannevar Bush made were ostensibly
for the good of the nation; they were sound. The men from EG&G were told that
the project they were about to work on was so important that it would remain
black forever, meaning it would never see the light of day. The men knew that a
secrecy classification inside the Atomic Energy Commission charter made this
possible, because they all worked on classified engineering projects that were
hidden from the rest of the world. They understood born classified meant that no
one would ever have a need-to-know what Vannevar Bush was going to ask

them to do. The operation would have no name, only a letter-number
designation: S-4, or Sigma-Four.

The problem that the EG&G engineers would face would be highly complex,
wide-ranging, without a definite formulation and with no set solution. This
wicked problem was wholly without precedent. Solving it would undoubtedly
have unintended consequences, because playing the engineering game would
change the game. But there were two puzzles to solve, not just one. Two
engineering mysteries for the elite group of EG&G engineers to unlock.

There was the crashed craft that had been sent by Stalin—with its Russian
writing stamped, or embossed, in a ring around the inside of the craft. So far, the
EG&G engineers were told, no one working on the project when it had been
headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base had been able to discern what
made Stalin’s craft hover and fly. Not even the German Paperclip scientists who
had been assigned to assist. So the crashed craft was job number one. Reverse
engineer it, Vannevar Bush said. Take it apart and put it back together again.
Figure out what made it fly.

But there was the second engineering problem to solve, the one involving the
child-size aviators. To understand this, the men were briefed on what it was they
were dealing with. They had to be. They were told that they, and they alone, had
a need-to-know about what had happened to these humans before they were put
in the craft and sent aloft. They were told that seeing the bodies would be a
shocking and disturbing experience. Because two of the aviators were comatose
but still alive, the men would have to transfer them into a Jell-O-like substance
and stand them upright in two tubular tanks, attached to a life-support system.
Sometimes, their mouths opened, and this gave the appearance of their trying to
speak. Remember, the engineers were told, these humans are in a comatose state.
They are unconscious; their bodies would never spark back to life.

Once, the children had been healthy humans. Not anymore. They were about
thirteen years old. Questions abounded. What made their heads so big? Had their
bodies been surgically manipulated to appear inhuman, or did the children have
genetic deformities? And what about their haunting, oversize eyes? The
engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by
Dr, Josef Mengele . the Nazi madman who, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, was
known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly
on children, dwarfs, and twins . The engineers learned that just before the war
ended, Josef Mengele made a deal with Stalin. Stalin offered Mengele an
opportunity to continue his work in eugenics—the science of improving a human

population by controlled breeding to increase desirable, heritable characteristics
—in secret, in the Soviet Union after the war. The engineers were told that this
deal likely occurred just before the war’s end, in the winter of 1945, when it was
clear to many members of the Nazi Party, including Mengele, that Nazi Germany
would lose the war and that its top commanders and doctors would be tried and
hanged for war crimes.

In Josef Mengele’s efforts to create a pure. Aryan race for Hitler, at
Auschwitz and elsewhere, he conducted experiments on people he considered
subhuman so as to breed certain features out. Mengele’s victims included Jewish
children, Gypsy children, and people with severe physical deformities. He
removed parts of children’s craniums and replaced them with bones from larger,
adult skulls. He removed and transplanted eyeballs, and injected people with
chemicals that caused them to lose their hair. On Mengele’s instruction, an
Auschwitz inmate, a painter named Dina Babbitt , made comparative drawings of
the shapes of heads, noses, mouths, and ears of people before and after the
grotesque surgeries Mengele performed. Another inmate doctor forced to work
for Mengele, named Dr. Martina Puzvna . recounted how Mengele had her keep
detailed measurements of the shapes and sizes of children’s body parts, casting
those of crippled children—particularly their hands and heads—in plaster molds.
When Mengele left Auschwitz, on January 17, 1945, he took the documentation
of his medical experiments with him. According to his only son. Rolf . Mengele
was still in possession of his medical research documents after the war.

The EG&G engineers were told that part of Joseph Stalin’s offer to Josef
Mengele stated that if he could create a crew of grotesque, child-size aviators for
Stalin, he would be given a laboratory in which to continue his work. According
to what the engineers were told, Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain
and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. Joseph Stalin did not. Mengele
never took up residence in the Soviet Union . Instead, he lived for four years in
Germany under an assumed name and then escaped to South America, where he
lived, first in Argentina and then in Paraguay, until his death in 1979.

When Joseph Stalin sent the biologically and/or surgically reengineered
children in the craft over New Mexico hoping it would land there, the engineers
were told, Stalin’s plan was for the children to climb out and be mistaken for
visitors from Mars. Panic would ensue, just like it did after the radio broadcast of
The War of the Worlds. America’s early-warning radar system would be
overwhelmed with sightings of other “UFOs.” Truman would see how easily a
totalitarian dictator could control the masses using black propaganda. Stalin may

have been behind the United States in atomic bomb technology, but when it
came to manipulating the people’s perception, Stalin was the leader with the
upper hand. This, says the engineer, is what he and the others in the group were
told.

For months I asked the engineer why President Truman didn’t use the remains
from the Roswell crash to show the world what an evil, abhorrent man Joseph
Stalin was. I guessed that maybe Truman didn’t want to admit the breach of U.S.
borders. For a long time, I never got an answer, just a shaking of the head. Here
was the engineer who had the answer to the riddle inside the riddle that is Area
51, but he was unwilling to say more. He is the only one of the original elite
group of EG&G engineers who is still alive. He said he wouldn’t tell me more,
no matter how many times I asked. One day, I asked again. “Why didn’t
President Truman reveal the truth in 1947?” This time he answered.

“Because we were doing the same thing,” he said. “They wanted to push
science. They wanted to see how far they could go.”

Then he said, “We did things I wish I had not done.”

Then, “We performed medical experiments on handicapped children and
prisoners.”

“But you are not a doctor,” I said.

“They wanted engineers.”

“On whose authority did you act?”

“The Atomic Energy Commission was in charge. And Vannevar Bush,” he
said. “People were killed. In this great United States.”

“Why did we do that?”

“You do what you do because you love your country, and you are told what
you are doing is for the good of the country,” the engineer said. Meaning out at
the original Area 51, starting in 1951, the EG&G engineers worked in secret on a
nefarious Nazi-inspired black project that would remain entirely hidden from the
public because Vannevar Bush told them it was the correct thing to do.

“It was a long, long time ago,” the engineer said. “I have tried to forget.”

“When did it end?” I asked.

No answer.

“In 1952?” I asked. Still no answer. “In 1953... 1954...?”

“At least through the 1980s it was still going on,” he said.

“I believe you should tell me the whole story,” I said. “Otherwise, once you

are gone, you will take the truth with you.”

“You don’t want to know,” he said.

“I do.”

“You don’t have a need-to-know,” he said.

For many months, I tried to learn more. I got pieces. Slivers of pieces. One-
word details. “This” confirmed and “that” reconfirmed, regarding what he had
previously said. One day, when we were eating lunch in a restaurant, I recounted
back to the engineer everything I knew. I asked for his permission to put it all in
this book. He did not say yes. He did not say no. We interviewed for more than
one year. Then one day, I asked him how much of the story I now knew.

“You don’t know half of it,” he said sadly.

I took a crouton, left over from my lunch, and set it down in the middle of the
restaurant’s white china plate. “If what I know equals this crouton,” I said,
pointing at the little brown piece of bread, “then is what I don’t know as big as
this plate?”

“Oh, my dear,” he said, shaking his head. “The whole truth is bigger than this
table we are eating on, including the chairs.”

He wouldn’t say more. He said he was hurting. That soon he would die. That,
really, it was best that I did not learn any more because I didn’t have a need-to-
know. But it is not just me who needs to know. We need to be able to keep
secrets, but this kind of secret-keeping—of this kind of secret—is the work of
totalitarian states, like the one we fought against for five decades during the Cold
War. Fighting totalitarianism was America’s rationale for building seventy
thousand nuclear weapons in sixty-five styles. In a free and open democratic
society, conducting projects in the name of science is one thing. Keeping forty-
year-old secrets from a president even after he tries to find them out is an
entirely different problem for a democratic nation. It sets a precedent. It makes it
easier for a group of powerful men to set up a program that defies the
Constitution and defiles morality in the name of science and national security, all
under the deceptive cover that no one has a need-to-know. I believe that even
though the engineer didn’t tell me everything, that is why he told me what he
did.

According to my source, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted
experiments on humans in a classified government facility in the Nevada desert
beginning in 1951. Although this was done in direct violation of the Nuremberg

Code of 1947, it is far from the first time the Commission had acted in violation
of the most basic moral principle involving voluntary human consent. In 1993,
reporter Eileen Welsome wrote a newspaper story stating that the Atomic Energy
Commission had conducted plutonium experiments on human beings, most
notably retarded children and orphan boys from the Fernald State School,
outside Boston, without the children’s or their guardians’ knowledge or consent.
After this horrible revelation came to light, President Clinton opened an
investigation to look into what the Atomic Energy Commission had done and the
secrets it had been able to safeguard inside its terrifying and unprecedented
system of secret-keeping. I asked the engineer why President Clinton hadn’t
learned about the S-4 facility at Area 51—or had he?

“I think he might have come very close,” the engineer said about President
Clinton. “But they kept it from him.”

“Who are they?” I asked. The engineer told me that his elite group had been
given the keys to the original facility at Area 51. “Who inherited those keys from
you five engineers?” I wanted to know.

“You don’t have a need-to-know” is all he would say.

EPILOGUE

In the summer of 2010 a book arrived in the mail from Colonel Leghorn, the
father of overhead reconnaissance, age ninety-one. The pages were musty and
smelled like an attic. What he had sent was his 1946 Army Air Forces
commemorative yearbook from the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests.
What is most striking is how the story of America’s first postwar nuclear test
begins as a “mysterious Army-Navy assignment” in a “sand-swept town—
Roswell.”

“Roswell... Roswell... Roswell... Roswell... Roswell... Roswell.”

The word repeats six times in the first few pages of the government-issued
yearbook, making it clear that it was from the Roswell Army Air Field in New
Mexico that the first shot in what would be a forty-three-year-old Cold War was
fired. And what a colossal opening shot Operation Crossroads was, an
unprecedented show of force aimed at letting Joseph Stalin know that America
was not done with the nuclear bomb. Forty-two thousand people were present in
the Pacific for the two nuclear bomb tests, including Stalin’s spies. The U.S.
government spent nearly two billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) to show the
world the nuclear power it now possessed.

“Stalin learned from Hitler,” the EG&G engineer says, “revenge... and other
things.” And that to consider Stalin’s perspective one should think about two key
moments in history, one right before World War II began and another right
before it ended. On August 23, 1939, one week before war in Europe officially
began, Hitler and Stalin agreed to be allies and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact, meaning each country promised not to attack the other when war in Europe
broke out. And yet almost immediately after shaking hands, Hitler began
plotting to double-cross Stalin. Twenty-two months later, Hitler’s sneak attack
against Russia resulted in millions of deaths. And then, just a few weeks before
World War II ended, Stalin, Truman, and Churchill met in Potsdam, Germany—

from July 17, 1945, to August 2, 1945—and agreed to be postwar allies. Just one
day before that conference began, America had secretly tested the world’s first
and only atomic bomb, inside the White Sands Proving Ground in the New
Mexico desert. Truman’s closest advisers had suggested that Truman share the
details of the atomic test with Stalin at Potsdam, but Truman did not. It didn’t
matter. Nuclear weapons historians believe that Joseph Stalin was already well
aware of what the Manhattan Project engineers had accomplished. Stalin had
spies inside the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory who had been providing him
with bomb blueprints and other information since 1941. By the time the Potsdam
conference rolled around, Stalin was already well at work on his own atomic
bomb. Despite Stalin and Truman pretending to be allies, neither side trusted the
other side, neither man trusted the other man. Each side was instead making
plans to build up its own atomic arsenal for future use. When Operation
Crossroads commenced just twelve months after the handshakes at Potsdam, the
Cold War battle lines were already indelibly drawn.

It follows that Stalin’s black propaganda hoax —the flying disc peopled with
alien look-alikes that wound up crashing near Roswell, New Mexico—could
have been the Soviet dictator’s revenge for Truman’s betrayal at Crossroads. His
double cross had to have been in the planning stages during the handshaking at
Potsdam, metaphorically mirroring what Hitler had done during the signing of
the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. By July of 1947, Stalin was still two years away
from being able to successfully test his own nuclear bomb. The flying disc at
Roswell, says the EG&G engineer, was “a warning shot across Truman’s bow.”
Stalin may not have had the atomic bomb just yet, but he had seminal hover and
fly technology, pilfered from the Germans, and he had stealth. Together, these
technologies made the American military gravely concerned. Perplexed by the
flying disc’s movements, and its radical ability to confuse radar, the Army Air
Forces was left wondering what else Stalin had in his arsenal of unconventional
weapons, usurped from the Nazis after the war.

“Hitler invented stealth.” says Gene Poteat . the first CIA officer in the
Agency’s history to be assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO.
Gene Poteat’s job was to assess Soviet radar threats, and to do this, he observed
many spy plane tests at Area 51. “Hitler’s stealth bomber was called the Horten
Ho 229,” Poteat says, “which is also called the Horten flying wing. It was
covered with radar-absorbing paint, carbon embedded in glue. The high graphic
content produced a result called ‘ghosting,’ which made it difficult for radar to
see.”

The Horten Ho 229 to which Poteat refers was the brainchild of two young
aircraft designers who worked for Hitler’s Luftwaffe, Walter and Reimar Horten.
These are the same two brothers who, in the fall of 1947, became the subject of
the U.S. Army Intelligence’s massive European manhunt called “Operation
Harass”—the search for a flying-saucer-type aircraft that could allegedly hover
and fly.

Whatever happened to the Horten brothers ? Unlike so many Nazi scientists
and engineers who were recruited under Operation Paperclip, Walter and Reimar
Horten were originally overlooked. After being captured by the U.S, Ninth Army
on April 7. 1945 . at their workshop in Gottingen, they were set up in a guarded
London high-rise near Hyde Park . There, they were interrogated by the famous
American physicist and rocket scientist Theodore Von Karman . who decided the
Horten brothers did not have much to offer the U.S. Army Air Forces by way of
aircraft technology—at least not with their flying wing. After being returned to
Germany, Reimar escaped to Argentina, where he was set up in a beautiful house
on the shores of Villa Carlos Paz Lake, thanks to Argentinean president and
ardent Nazi supporter Juan Peron. Walter lived out his life in Baden-Baden,
Germany, hiding in plain sight.

The information about the Horten brothers comes from the aircraft historian
David Myhra, who, in his search to understand all-wing aircraft, industriously
tracked down both Horten brothers, visited them in their respective countries in
the 1980s, and recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with them on audiotape.
These tapes can be found in the archives of the Smithsonian Air and Space
Museum.

“ Reimar had me agree to two restrictions before I went to South America to
interview him,” Myhra explains. “One was that I couldn’t ask questions about
Hitler or the Third Reich.” And the second was that “he said he didn’t want to
talk about the CIA. Reimar said there was this crazy idea that he’d designed
some kind of a flying saucer and that the CIA had [supposedly] been looking for
him.” Myhra says Reimar Horten was adamant in his refusal to discuss anything
related to the CIA. “The subject was off-limits for him,” Myhra says. The
conversation with Reimar Horten that Myhra refers to took place in the decade
before Army Intelligence released to the public its three-hundred-page file on
Operation Harass. This is the file that discusses the U.S. manhunt for the Horten
brothers and their so-called flying disc. The Operation Harass file makes clear
that someone from an American intelligence organization made contact with
Reimar in the late 1940s to interrogate him about the flying disc. More than forty

years later, Reimar Horten still refused to talk about what was said. A 2010
Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of the Army, Office of
the General Counsel, Army Pentagon, issued a “no records response.” A
secondary appeal was also “denied.”

If Stalin really did get the Horten brothers’ flying disc, either from the
brothers themselves or from blueprints they had drawn, how did Stalin get their
flying disc to hover and fly on like that? What became of the craft’s hover
technology, powered by some mysterious power plant, which was also so
fervently sought by Counter Intelligence Corps agents during Operation Harass?
The EG&G engineer says that while he does not know what research was
conducted on the “equipment” when it was at Wright-Patterson, beginning in
1947, he does know about the research conducted on the “power plant” after he
received the “equipment,” in Nevada in 1951.

“There was another [important! EG&G engineer .” he explains. That engineer
was assigned the task of learning about Stalin’s hover technology, “which was
called electromagnetic frequency, or EMF.” This engineer “spent an entire year
in a windowless room” inside an EG&G building in downtown Las Vegas trying
to understand how EMF worked. “We figured it out,” the EG&G engineer says.
“We’ve had hover and fly technology all this time.”

I asked the EG&G engineer to take me to the place where hover and fly
technology was allegedly solved, and he did. Archival photographs and Atomic
Energy Commission video footage confirm that the site once contained several
buildings that were operated by EG&G. Not anymore. Instead, the facility inside
of which an EG&G engineer unlocked one of Area 51’s original secrets in the
early 1950s is now nothing but an empty lot of asphalt and weeds ringed by a
chain-link fence. Is this what will become of Area 51 in sixty years? Will it too
be moved? Will it go underground? Has it already?

What about flying saucers from a physicist’s point of view? Edward Lovick,
the grandfather of America’s stealth technology, says that in the late 1950s,

Kelly Johnson had him spend many months in Lockheed’s anechoic chamber
radar testing small-scale models of flying saucers. “ Little wooden discs built in
the Skunk Works wood shop,” Lovick recalls. According to Lovick, Kelly
Johnson eventually decided that round-shaped aircraft—flying discs without
wings—were aerodynamically unstable and therefore too dangerous for pilots to
fly. This was before the widespread use of pilotless aircraft, or drones.

What about the child-size pilots inside the flying disc? Shortly after the
Roswell crash in July 1947, a press officer from the Roswell Army Air Field, a

man named Walter Haut, was dispatched to the radio station KGFL in Roswell
with a press release saying the Roswell Army Air Force was in possession of a
flying disc. Haut was the emissary of the original Roswell Statement, which, in
addition to being broadcast over the airwaves, was famously printed in the San
Francisco Chronicle the following day. It was Walter Haut who, three hours
later, was sent back to KGFL by the commander of the Army Air Field with a
second press release, one that said that the first press release was actually
incorrect.

Walter Haut died in December 2005 and left a sworn affidavit to be opened
only after his death. In the text, Haut said the second press release was
fraudulent, meant to cover up the first statement, which was true. Haut also said
that in addition to recovering a flying craft, the military recovered bodies from a
second crash site—small, child-size bodies with disproportionately large heads.

“I am convinced that what I personally observed was some kind of craft and its
crew from outer space,” Haut wrote.

The EG&G engineer’s explanation about the child pilots inside the flying
disc answers the riddle of the so-called Roswell aliens, certainly in a manner that
would satisfy the fourteenth-century English friar and philosopher William of
Ockham. It is an answer that is not more complicated than the riddle itself.
According to the EG&G engineer, the aviators were not aliens but were created
to look like them, by Josef Mengele, “shortly before or immediately after the end
of the war.” Children would have had great difficulty piloting an aircraft. The
engineer says he was told the flying disc was piloted remotely, but offered
almost no information about what would have had to have been the larger
aircraft from which this early “drone” was launched. “It came down over
Alaska,” he says.

What about Bob Lazar? In the course of interviewing thirty-two individuals
who lived and worked at Area 51,1 asked the majority what they thought of
Lazar’s 1989 revelation about Area 51. Most made highly skeptical comments
about Bob Lazar; none claimed ever to have met him. While it appears that
Lazar lied about his education, his statements about S-4 should not be summarily
dismissed as fraud.

The EG&G engineer says that the S-4 facility that housed the original
Roswell “equipment” continued on for decades, which fits with Bob Lazar’s
time line. Lazar says he worked at Area 51 from 1988 to 1989. Lazar told
newsman George Knapp that at S-4, he saw something through a window, inside
an unmarked room, that could have been an alien. Was what happened to Lazar

just like what happened to the P-38 Lightning pilot who, flying over the
California desert during the dawn of the jet age, thought he saw a gorilla flying
an airplane when really he saw Bell Aircraft chief test pilot Jack Woolams
wearing a gorilla mask? Perhaps Lazar drew the only conclusion he could have
drawn based on the information he had. And perhaps the Atomic Energy
Commission had taken a page out of the CIA’s playbook on deception
campaigns: it needed to produce the belief that something false was something
true. Perhaps scientists and engineers who were brought to S-4 in the later years
were told that they were working on alien beings and alien spacecraft. Try going
public with that story and you will wind up disgraced like Bob Lazar. As it was
with the P-38 Lightning pilots in 1942, it remains today. No one likes being
mistaken for a fool.

“ It’s difficult to be taken seriously in the scientific community when you’re
known as ‘the UFO guy,”’ Bob Lazar stated on the record in 2010 for this book.

For decades, hundreds of serious people—civilians, lawmakers, and military
personnel—have made considerable efforts to locate the records for the Roswell
crash remains. And yet no such record group has ever been located, despite
formal investigations by senators, congressmen, the governor of New Mexico,
and the federal government’s Government Accountability Office. This is because
no one has known where to look. Until now, the world has been knocking on the
wrong door. The information has been protected from declassification by
draconian Atomic Energy Commission classification rules, hidden inside secret
Restricted Data files that were originally created for the Atomic Energy
Commission by EG&G.

So now it is known.

How did Vannevar Bush get so much power? He was once the most
important scientist in America. President Truman awarded him the Medal for
Merit in a White House ceremony, President Johnson presented him with the
National Medal of Science, and the queen of England dubbed him a knight. The
statements made by the EG&G engineer about what Vannevar Bush authorized
engineers and scientists to do at Area 51’s S-4 facility are truly shocking and
almost unbelievable. Except a clear historical precedent exists for Vannevar
Bush having exactly this kind of power, secrecy, and control.

Vannevar Bush lorded over the mother of all black operations—the
engineering of the world’s first nuclear bomb. And as director of the Office of
Scientific Research and Development, which controlled the Manhattan Project,
Vannevar Bush was also in charge of human experiments to study the effects of

the bioweapons lewisite and mustard gas on man. Some of those human guinea
pigs were soldiers and others were conscientious objectors to the war, but a 1993
study of these programs by the National Academy of Sciences made clear that
the test subjects were not consenting adults. “ Although the human subjects were
called ‘volunteers,’ it was clear from the official reports that recruitment of the
World War II human subjects, as well as those in the later experiments, was
accomplished through lies and half-truths,” wrote the Institute of Medicine.

The “later experiments” to which the committee refers were conducted by a
group also under Vannevar Bush’s direction, this one called the Committee on
Medical Research. As discovered by President Clinton’s advisory committee on
human experiments, this so-called medical research involved using as guinea
pigs individuals living at the Dixon Institution for the Retarded, in Illinois, and
at the New Jersey State Colony for the Feeble-Minded . The doctors were testing
vaccines for malaria, influenza, and sexually transmitted diseases. Some
programs continued until 1973.

Even more troubling is this: buried in Atomic Energy Commission archives is
the fact that the first incarnation of the Manhattan Project had a letter-number
designation of S-l . Were there two other programs that transpired between S-l
and S-4? And if so, what were they? What else might have been done to push
science in a way that the ends could justify the means?

In this book, many pieces of the Area 51 puzzle are put into place, but many
questions remain. What goes on at Area 51 now? We don’t know. We won’t
know for decades. Airplanes have gotten faster and stealthier. Remote-controlled
spy planes fire missiles. Classified delivery systems drop bombs. The players are
mostly the same: CIA, Air Force, Department of Energy, Lockheed, North
American, General Atomics, and Hughes. These are but a few.

The biggest players tend to remain, as always, behind the veil. Almost a
century ago, in 1922, Vannevar Bush cofounded a company that contracted first
with the military and later with the Atomic Energy Commission. He called his
company Raytheon because it meant “light from the gods.” Raytheon has always
maintained a considerable presence at the Nevada Test Site, the Nevada Test and
Training Range, and Area 51. Currently, it is the fifth-biggest defense contractor
in the world. It is the world’s largest producer of guided missiles and the leader
in developing radar technology for America’s early-warning defense system.

This is the same system that, in the 1950s, CIA director General Walter Bedell
Smith feared the Soviets might overrun with a UFO hoax, leaving the nation
vulnerable to an air attack.

As for EG&G, they were eventually acquired by the powerful Carlyle Group
at the end of the twentieth century but later resold, in 2002, to another corporate
giant called URS. Currently, EG&G remains partnered with Raytheon in a joint
venture at the Nevada Test and Training Range and at Area 51. The program,
called JT3 —Joint Test, Tactics, and Training, LLC—provides “engineering and
technical support for the Nevada Test and Training Range,” according to
corporate brochures. When asked what exactly that means, EG&G’s parent
company, URS, declined to comment. This is corporate America’s way of
saying, “You don’t have a need-to-know.”

The veil has been lifted. The curtain has been pulled back on Area 51. But
what has been revealed in this book is like a single bread crumb in a trail. There
is so much more that remains unknown. Where does the trail lead? How far does
it go? Will it ever end?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

]VIany have asked me how this book came to be. In 2007,1 was at a Christmas
Eve dinner when my husband’s uncle’s wife’s sister’s husband—a spry physicist
named Edward Lovick, who was eighty-eight years old at the time—leaned over
to me and said, “Have I got a good story for you.” As a national security
reporter, I hear this line frequently—my work depends on it—but what Lovick
told me ranked among the most surprising and tantalizing things I’d heard in a
long time. Until then, I was under the impression that Lovick had spent his life
designing airplane parts. Over dinner I learned that he was actually a physicist
and that he’d played a major role in the development of aerial espionage for the
CIA. The reason Lovick could suddenly divulge information that had been kept
secret for fifty years was because the CIA had just declassified it. When I
learned that much of Lovick’s clandestine work took place at that mysterious and
mythic location Area 51, also called Groom Lake, I smiled. So, the place was
real after all. Immediately, I wrote to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of
Defense requesting an official tour of the Groom Lake Area—Lovick also told
me that the CIA had given up control of the place decades earlier. My request
was formally denied, on Department of Defense letterhead, but oddly with the
words “the Groom Lake Area” separated out in quotes attributed to me, so as to
make clear the Pentagon’s official position regarding their Nevada base: That
locale may be part of your lexicon, they seemed to be saying, but it is most
definitely not officially part of ours. As an investigative journalist I sought to
know why.

Since then, more individuals than I could have ever imagined have
generously shared their Area 51 stories with me. I am indebted to each and every
one of them. The list I thank includes everyone in this book: the legendary
soldiers, spies, scientists, and engineers—professionals who, for the most part,
are not known for sharing their inner lives. That so many individuals opened up
with me—relaying their triumphs and tragedies, their sorrows and joys—so that
others may make sense of it all has been an experience of a lifetime. Why I was

given access to information that countless others have been denied remains a
great mystery to me. A reporter is dependent on primary sources. From their
stories, and using keywords such as operational cover names, I was then able to
locate corroborating documents, often found deeply buried in U.S. government
archives. I wouldn’t have had a clue where to look without their aid. Specific
examples are sourced in the Notes section.

T. D. Barnes is one of the most generous people I have met. He introduced
me to many people, who in turn introduced me to their colleagues and friends.
Barnes took me to Creech Air Force Base, at Indian Springs, Nevada, as part of a
very private tour. There I was allowed to watch U.S. Air Force pilots fly drones
halfway across the world, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Barnes also arranged for my
tours of Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, where I sat inside a Russian MiG
fighter jet and examined the Hawk missile system and the F-117 Nighthawk up
close. And it was Barnes who, in the fall of 2010, advocated tirelessly on my
behalf to allow me to join a group of pilots and engineers at CIA headquarters in
Langley, Virginia, and at the Defense Intelligence Agency Headquarters in
Washington, DC, as part of a week-long symposium on overhead espionage. I
met many people during this trip who were extraordinarily helpful to me, on
background, and I thank them all.

Ken Collins lives in the same city as I do, which meant that for a year and a
half I got to interview him regularly over lunch. He is a remarkable pilot and an
even more extraordinary person. Thank you, Colonel Slater, Frank Murray,

Roger Andersen, Tony Bevacqua, and Ray Goudey, for sharing so many unique
flying stories with me. Thank you, Buzz Aldrin, for explaining to me what it
feels like up there on the moon.

A1 O’Donnell arranged for my temporary security clearance so that I could
accompany him to the federally restricted land that is the Nevada Test Site.
Looking into the Sedan nuclear crater—so vast it is visible from outer space—is
not something I will ever forget. While Area 51, Area 25, and Area 13 were off-
limits to us on that visit, that I was able even to get within a stone’s throw of
these three hidden places is thanks to O’Donnell. And a special thanks to Ruth,
Al’s very capable wife. From Jim Freedman I learned things that could be
contained in their own book. Freedman has the unusual ability to share deeply
personal experiences with stunning clarity, objectivity, and conviction. Once, he
explained why: “I tell you all this, Annie, because you give a damn.”

Dr. Bud Wheelon, the CIA’s first deputy director of science and technology,
has given only a few interviews in his life. I am grateful to have joined those

ranks. During one of our interviews he stopped mid-story to thoroughly explain
missile technology to me. From that moment on I understood what was at stake
during the Cuban missile crisis. How close we came to nuclear war.

Lieutenant Colonel Hervey Stockman and Colonel Richard Leghorn are
legends among legendary men. Colonel Leghorn generously shared with me
artifacts he had stored away in his attic, shipping original photographs, long-lost
articles, and out-of-print books across the country for my review. Thanks to his
assistant, Barbara Austin, for her help. Hervey Stockman was not so easy to
locate at first, but when I finally did reach him, on the telephone, it was a
magical moment. Thank you, Peter Stockman, for sending me a copy of
Hervey’s oral history, which was an invaluable source of information.

For all the investigating that goes on in writing a book like this, sometimes
the most sought-after information comes in the most whimsical of ways. In the
summer of 2009,1 went to the Nuclear Testing Archive library in Las Vegas to
locate declassified documents on the Project 57 “dirty bomb” test, ones that were
mysteriously missing from the Department of Energy’s online repository. Even
in person, the staff was unable to fulfill my records request. Hindered and
frustrated, I took a walk around the adjacent atomic-testing museum to cool
down. Reporter’s notebook in hand, I was staring at a photograph of a mushroom
cloud hanging on the wall when the museum’s security guard walked up and said
hello. It was Richard Mingus. We’d met briefly before, on an earlier visit. I told
Mingus that I felt records on Project 57 were being withheld from me over at the
library. In his characteristic matter-of-fact style Mingus said, “Well, I worked on
that test. What is it you’d like to know?” Mingus, I quickly learned, was also one
of the CIA’s original Area 51 security guards. Thanks to Mingus, the “missing”
Project 57 documents became easier to locate.

At the National Archives and Records Administration, thank you to Timothy
Nenninger, chief of the Textual Records Reference Staff, Martha Murphy, chief
of Special Access and FOIA Staff, and Tom Mills, who specializes in World War
II records; thank you, Rita Cann, at the National Personnel Records Center in St.
Louis, Missouri; Martha DeMarre of the Nuclear Testing Archive in Las Vegas;
Troy Wade of the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation; Tech Sergeant
Jennifer Lindsey of the U.S. Air Force; Staff Sergeant Alice Moore, Creech Air
Force Base; Dr. David R. Williams, NASA; Dr. David Robarge, chief historian,
Central Intelligence Agency; Tony Hiley, curator and director of the CIA
Museum; Cheryl Moore, EEA CIA; Jim Long, Laughlin Heritage Foundation
Museum; R. Cargill Hall, historian emeritus, National Reconnaissance Office;

Dr. Craig Luther, chief historian, Edwards Air Force Base; S. Eugene Poteat,
president of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers; Melissa Dalton,
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics; Dr. Jeffrey Richelson, National Security
Archives; David Myhra, author and aviation historian; Fred Burton, former
special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service; Sherre Lovick, former
Lockheed Skunk Works engineer; Colonel Adelbert W. “Buz” Carpenter, former
SR-71 pilot; Charles “Chuck” Wilson, former U-2 pilot; Arthur Beidler, 67th
Reconnaissance Tactical Squadron, Japan; Dennis Nordquist, Pratt & Whitney
mechanical engineer; Tony Landis, NASA photographer; Michael Schmitz,
Roadrunners Internationale photographer; Joerg Arnu, Norio Hayakawa, and
Peter Merlin of Dreamlandresort.com. A special thank you to Doris Barnes,
Barbara Slater, Stacy Slater Bernhardt, Stella Murray, Mary Martin, and Mary
Jane Murphy. Thank you, Jeff King, for making me such an excellent map, and
Ploy Siripant, for a phenomenal job on the jacket. Thank you Tommy Harron,
Jerry Maybrook, and Jeremy Wesley for the great work on the audio book.

Once I completed a draft of this manuscript, my editor, John Parsley, helped
me to refine it into the book that it is. What I learned from John about
storytelling is immeasurable. Thank you also to Nicole Dewey, Geoff Shandler,
and Michael Pietsch.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Jim Hornfischer, the perfect agent for someone
like me, and to my confidant Frank Morse. Thank you for the wise counsel,

Steve Younger, David Willingham, Aron Ketchel, Eric Rayman, and Karen
Andrews.

It takes a village to make a writer. I’m one of the lucky ones who has always
known writing is what I was meant to do. I arrived at St. Paul’s School in
Concord, New Hampshire, at the age of fifteen, typewriter in hand, and wrote for
nearly twenty years straight without earning as much as one cent. Only at the age
of thirty-four did things shift for me, and I’ve earned my living as a writer ever
since. I say that for all of the writers following in my footsteps. Don’t give up.
My village fire keepers—those to whom I am deeply indebted for their
individually imperative roles—include Alice and Tom Soininen, Julie Elkins,
John Soininen; my writing teacher at St. Paul’s School, Michael Burns, and at
Princeton University, Paul Auster, Joyce Carol Oates, and P. Adams Sitney; my
storytelling hero in Greece, John Zervos; those who supported me in Big Sur:
Lisa Firestone, Thanis Iliadis, Alex Timken, Robert Jolliffe, Harriet and Jeremy
Polturak, James Young, Nate Downey, Emmy Starr and Stephen Vehslage,
Samantha Muldoon, Erin Gafill and Tom Birmingham; my mentors in Los

Angeles: Rachel Resnick, Keith Rogers, Kathleen Silver, Rio Morse, and my
friend and editor in chief at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Nancie Clare, who
commissioned my original two-part series on Area 51 for the magazine; my
fellow writers from group: Kirston Mann, Sabrina Weill, Michelle Fiordaliso,
Nicole Lucas Haimes, Annette Murphy, Terry Rossio, Jolly Stamat, Moira
McMahon, Lisa Gold; fellow storyteller Lucy Firestone; my mother-in-law,
Marion Wroldsen, not only for her deep love of reading but for lending me her
son.

Nothing in this world is so joyful as being the wife of Kevin Jacobsen and the
mother of our two boys. While writing this book, it was Kevin who made
endless sandwiches for me, brewed pots of coffee, and let me travel to wherever
it was that I needed to go. Kevin hears out every first draft, usually standing in
our kitchen or yard. Everything gets better after I listen to what he has to say.

NOTES

Prologue: The Secret City

1. Nevada Test and Training Range : Map reference number NTTR01, NGA
stock no. 84413.

2. Nevada Test Site : Map based on NTS Boundary Coordinates: FFACO,
appendix 1, January 1998, revision 2, 6. On Aug 23, 2010, the Nevada Test Site
changed its name to the Nevada National Security Site. Throughout the book, I
refer to it as the Nevada Test Site, as that is the name it went by for nearly sixty
years.

3. 105 nuclear weapons : Department of Energy, “United States Nuclear
Tests,” xii-xv. Total atmospheric for Nevada Test Site (NTS) is officially listed
as 100 and total Nellis Air Force Range (NAFR) is listed as 5. Underground is
804 by U.S. plus 24 by U.S./UK for a total of 933.

4. weapons-grade plutonium and uranium : Darwin Morgan, spokesman for
the National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Site Office, clarified:
“The [Nevada Test Site] has never been a repository for weapons grade
plutonium or uranium. Of course there is the ‘expended’ material from 828
underground nuclear weapons tests that is contained within the cavities where
the tests were conducted.” E-mail, September 21, 2010.

5. two known exceptions : Memo, Top Secret Oxcart, Oxcart Reconnaissance
Operation Plan, BYE 2369-67, 15; second example from interview with Peter
Merlin.

6. bomb’s price tag : Brookings Institute, “50 Facts about U.S. Nuclear
Weapons,” fact no. 1 (1996 dollars: $20,000,000,000; 2011 dollars:
$28,000,000,000).

7. was relayed to him by two men : Wiesner, Varmevar Bush, 98. This fact is
hardly known; credit is usually given to General Leslie R. Groves and War
Secretary Henry L. Stimson. Wiesner, Vannevar Bush’s biographer at the

National Academy of Sciences (he was also a science adviser to President
Eisenhower), wrote: “Bush... had the duty, after the death of President
Roosevelt, of giving President Truman his first detailed account of the bomb.”

8. no one knew the Manhattan Project was there : Wills, Bomb Power, 10-13.
Wills elaborated on how Truman had some suspicions when he was vice
president and approached War Secretary Henry L. Stimson, who told him to
back off, which Truman did.

9. who would control its “unimaginable destructive power” : Smyth, Atomic
Energy for Military Purposes, 13.7. Also known as The Smyth Report, it was
released by the government six days after Hiroshima, on August 12, 1945. Here,
Smyth chronicled the administrative and technical history of the Manhattan
Project, also called the Manhattan Engineering District (MED). The purpose of
the report was allegedly to give citizens enough information about nuclear
energy for them to participate in a public debate about what to do next. The
report also encouraged the idea that handing the bomb over to civilian control, as
opposed to military control, would be a more democratic scenario. Instead, the
controls imposed by the Atomic Energy Commission would ultimately prove to
be even more impenetrable than military controls; Hewlett and Anderson, New
World.

10. the concept “born classified” came to be : Quist, Security Classification,

1. Here Quist writes: “The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 was the first and, other
than its successor, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, to date the only U.S. statute
to establish a program to restrict the dissemination of information. This Act
transferred control of all aspects of atomic (nuclear) energy from the Army,
which had managed the government’s World War II Manhattan Project to
produce atomic bombs, to a five-member civilian Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC). These new types of bombs, of awesome power, had been developed
under stringent secrecy and security conditions. Congress, in enacting the 1946
Atomic Energy Act, continued the Manhattan Project’s comprehensive, rigid
controls on U.S. information about atomic bombs and other aspects of atomic
energy. The Atomic Energy Act designated the atomic energy information to be
protected as ‘Restricted Data’ and defined that data.”

11. seventy thousand nuclear bombs : Brookings Institute, “50 Facts about
U.S. Nuclear Weapons,” fact no. 6.

12. Atomic Energy was the first entity to control Area 51 : This is one of the
central organizing premises of my book and will no doubt be contested by the
Atomic Energy Commission until they are forced to declassify the project to
which I refer.

13. when President Clinton : The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation
Experiments (ACHRE) was created by President Clinton on January 15, 1994, to
investigate and make public the use of human beings as subjects of federally
funded research. Created by executive order and subject to the Federal Advisory
Committee Act (FACA), the advisory committee was obligated to provide public
access to its activities, processes, and papers, some of which can be viewed at
http :/Avww. gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/ .

14. he did not have a need-to-know : Author interview with EG&G engineer.

15. “givers! the professional classificationist unanswerable authority” : Quist,
Security Classification, 24; Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 442-51.

16. largest facility is. and always has been, the Nevada Test Site : Written
correspondence with Darwin Morgan, September 21, 2010, U.S. Department of
Energy, Nevada Operations Office, Office of Public Affairs and Information.

17. not controlled by the Department of Defense : It cannot yet be determined
for certain if the Department of Defense (DOD) was involved in running the
very first program at Area 51. Research at NARA (National Archives and
Records Administration) reveals that DOD had a lot more to do with Paperclips
than previously known publicly. For example, documents obtained by me
through a FOIA request reveal “in the early 1950s the Defense Department
[Office of Defense Research and Engineering (ORE)] and the JIOA took up
overall direction of PAPERCLIP, which ran under the acronym of DEFSIP, or
Defense Scientist Immigration Program.” JIOA stands for Joint Intelligence
Objectives Agency and was run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These multiple
agencies and multiple chains of command serve to hide information.

Chapter One: The Riddle of Area 51

Interviews: Joerg Arnu, George Knapp, Thornton “T.D.” Barnes, Colonel
Hugh Slater, Richard Mingus, Ernest “Ernie” Williams, Dr. Albert “Bud”
Wheelon, Colonel Kenneth Collins, Colonel Sam Pizzo, Norio Hayakawa,
Stanton Friedman

1. Nighttime is the best time : Interview with Joerg Arnu.

2. Robert Scott Lazar appeared on Eyewitness News : Interview with George
Knapp; George Knapp, “Bob Lazar: The Man Behind Area 51,” Eyewitness
News Investigates, http://area51.eyewitnessnews8.com/ .

3. veiled threats of incarceration : A common note among most Area 51
employees interviewed, certainly among the Air Force enlisted men, was the
“threat of Leavenworth,” meaning incarceration at the largest federal security
prison in the United States at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

4. Dr. Edward Teller : Teller, who died in 2003 at the age of ninety-five, never
confirmed or denied that he referred Lazar to EG&G for work at Area 51.

*contaminated with plutonium: Interviews with Richard Mingus; see notes
for chapter 6.

5. for a lecture Teller was giving : The subject of Teller’s lecture was the
nuclear freeze movement under way in a post-Three Mile Island world.

6. a page-1 story featuring Bob Lazar : Los Alamos Monitor, June 27, 1982,
identifies Lazar as “a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.”

7. Lazar’s life had reached an unexpected low : The most comprehensive
information on Lazar is available at the Area 51 research Web site
Dreamlandresort.com, created by Joerg H. Arnu in 1999. In “The Bob Lazar
Corner” one can find a time line of Lazar’s story as well as a compilation of
public records, letters, and commentary about Lazar by his critics and his
friends, as researched by Tom Mahood, whom I interviewed.

8. Tracy Murk : According to the wedding certificate researched by Tom
Mahood. Also according to Mahood’s research, Tracy Ann Murk and Lazar
married for a second time, on October 12, 1986 (the first wedding was April 19,

1986), with Murk inexplicably using the name Jackie Diane Evans.

9. committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide : Ibid. Death certificate
#001423-86, Clark County Health District, Las Vegas, NV; cause of death:
“inhalation of motor vehicle exhaust.” Sourced by Tom Mahood.

10. Fly to Area 51 : Descriptions based on multiple eyewitness interviews; see
Primary Interviews.

11. designed by Raytheon to detect incoming missile signals : Interview with
T. D. Barnes.

12. The miner kept the secrecy oath : Interview with Colonel Slater.

13. access point Gate 385 : Interview with Richard Mingus.

14. trucks from the Atomic Energy Commission motor pool : Interview with
Ernie Williams. A farm boy from Nebraska, Williams’s father was a “water
witch,” and Williams inherited some water-locating charm. In this manner, he is
the man credited by many Roadrunners as having officially found Area 51’s first
water well.

15. men dressed in HAZMAT suits : R. Kinnison and R. Gilbert, “Estimates
of Soil Removal for Cleanup of Transuranics at NAEG Offsite Safety Shot
Sites,” FY 1981, 1984, 1986-91.

16. would have gone through security there : Interview with anonymous
EG&G employee who worked for the airline.

17. tennis matches : Interview with Dr. Wheelon.

18. jumping into the pool : Interview with Ken Collins.

19. Area 51 bar, called Sam’s Place : Interview with Colonel Pizzo.

20. According to Lazar : Lazar’s original interviews with George Knapp are
available on YouTube in six parts.

21. He glanced sideways, through a small nine-bv-nine-inch window : Lazar’s
interview with George Knapp, part two of six, minutes 4:10-5:05. Knapp: “In an
earlier interview, you had mentioned you saw what you thought may be an alien.
Was it an alien? What did you see?” Lazar: “What I had said and all that

occurred was that I was walking by a door, ah, a door that had a small, nine-by-
nine window in it, little wires running through it. And glanced in there, and there
were two... ah, either technicians, scientists, or whoever they were, looking
down at something. And what that something was caught my eye and I never
really did see what it was. A lot of people have asserted, well, there was an alien,
they’re aliens working around there and so on and so forth, I mean, I don’t think
that was the case. But, ah, who knows. I was. You know. You’re seeing all these
fantastic things and your mind gets going and you know you catch something
out of the corner of your eye, who knows what your mind is going to come up
with so I certainly wouldn’t stand on that as fact by any means.” See
http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=XAfVZcAsTxk.

22. what was maybe an alien : Lazar’s interview with George Knapp, part two
of six, minutes 2:33-3:30. Lazar says he was told the UFO he was assigned to
work on originated from another planet. He says he was shown autopsy
photographs of the craft’s alien pilots, which he described to Knapp in their
interview: “One or two autopsy photographs I saw ah, dealt with just a small
photograph, a bust shot essentially, just head, shoulders, and chest of an alien
where the ah, ah, chest was cut open in a T’ fashion and one single organ was
removed. The organ itself in the other picture was cut and vivisectioned
essentially the, ah, showing the different chambers in there. This was totally
unrelated to anything I was doing but from that photograph it looked like what
you see in UFO lore as the typical ‘gray’ [slang for alien ] so how tall it was from
what I could see, I couldn’t tell, ’cause I only saw a portion of the photograph
but if everything else you see is correct, I would imagine it was three and a half
or four feet tall. But ah, there again, you know all I had to see was a photograph.
And you know, I didn’t have much to go on.” See

http://www, youtube.com/watch?v=XAfVZcAsTxk&feature=related .

23. The group made a trip : Tom Mahood, “The Robert Lazar Timeline, as
assembled from Public Records and Statements,” July 1994, updated July 1997,
from dreamlandresort.com. In this time line Lazar and various friends made a
total of three trips into the mountains behind Groom Lake. It was on the third
trip that his group was stopped by guards.

24. transcripts of his wife’s telephone conversations : Ibid.

25. Norio Havakawa : Interview with Norio Hayakawa.

26. He had bodyguards : In the interview with Knapp, Lazar said he was shot
at while driving on the freeway (YouTube interview five of six, minute 6:00) and
that during his debrief at Indian Springs a gun was pointed at him (ibid., minute
8 : 00 ).

27. Lie detector tests : WSVN-7 News reporter Dan Hausle’s interview with
former policeman Terry Cavernetti, accessed on December 21, 2010, YouTube,
“Bob Lazar Passes the Lie Detector on UFOs.”

28. Stanton Friedman : Interview with Stanton Friedman. Friedman was
employed for fourteen years as a nuclear physicist and worked on many
advanced nuclear and space travel systems for companies like General Motors,
General Electric, and Westinghouse. He has published eighty UFO papers,
written six books, and appears in many UFO documentaries.

29. Stanton Friedman’s expose on the Roswell incident : Recollections of
Roswell, Testimony from 27 Witnesses Connected with Recovery of 2 Crashed
Flying Saucers in New Mexico in July 1947, DVD, 105 minutes.

30. a book based on Friedman and Moore’s research was published : Berlitz
and Moore, Roswell Incident. Friedman said it was a group decision to give
Berlitz author credit instead of him, as Berlitz was from the Berlitz Language
School family and had the credibility necessary to sell the publisher on the
book’s controversial subject matter. Charles Berlitz spoke twenty-five languages
and is often listed as one of the most important linguists of the twentieth century.
His 1974 book, The Bermuda Triangle, sold an estimated ten million copies.

Chapter Two: Imagine a War of the Worlds

Interviews: Colonel Richard S. Leghorn, Ralph “Jim” Freedman, Alfred “Al”
O’Donnell, Lieutenant Colonel Hervey Stockman, Colonel Slater, David Myhra

1. became convinced that Martians were attacking Earth : Trenton Evening
Times, October 31, 1938. Many documents relating to The War of the Worlds
radio play are available at http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/documents.htm .

2. Switchboards jammed : Ibid., “Log from Jersey Police, Port Norris
Station.”

3. the FCC’s role : Associated Press, “Mars Monsters Broadcast Will Not Be
Repeated. Perpetrators of the Innovation Regret Causing of Public Alarm,”
November 1, 1938.

4. Adolf Hitler took note as well : Hand, Terror on the Air! 7.

5. Joseph Stalin had also been : Author interview with EG&G engineer.

6. Vannevar Bush, observed the effects : Correspondence between Vannevar
Bush and W. C. Forbes, June 8, 1939; Vannevar Bush, A Register of His Papers
in the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, DC.

7. “Science Discovers Real Frankenstein” : Winthrop, “Science Discovers.”

8. War of the Worlds radio broadcast as an example : Zachary, Endless
Frontier, 190.

9. President Roosevelt had appointed : “Vannevar Bush, A Collection of His
Papers in the Library of Congress,” Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington DC.

10. his next move : Zachary, Endless Frontier, 285. Zachary wrote, “Bush’s
role in the A-bomb’s birth actually burnished his reputation. Like Truman, most
Americans were thrilled by Japan’s surrender and the end of the war... Rather
than interrogate the leaders of the Manhattan Project, the public embraced them.
Bush’s reputation as a scientific seer grew; his image as an unmatched organizer
of expertise solidified. For Bush, the atomic bomb capped off his five-year rise

to celebrity from relative obscurity.”

11. As Americans celebrated peace : “Majority Supports Use of Atomic Bomb
on Japan in WWII”: David Moore, Gallup News Service, August 5, 2005.

12. Operation Crossroads was in full swing : Author interview with Colonel
Leghorn, who was the commanding officer of Task Force 1.5.2 for the operation.
I am indebted to Colonel Leghorn not only for generously sharing with me
recollections of his historic role at Crossroads, beginning with his departure by
airplane from the Roswell Army Air Field, but for lending me original
photographs taken from his airplane during the 1946 nuclear tests. He also
loaned me two original yearbook-type books where I learned the operation
involved more than ten thousand instruments and nearly half the world’s supply
of film. The Air Force alone took nine million photographs.

13. There were barracuda everywhere : Interview with Ralph “Jim”

Freedman. Freedman’s first visit to Bikini was for the nuclear test Castle Bravo,
six years after Crossroads, but the barracuda problem was the same.

14. led by a king named Juda : Bradley, No Place to Hide, 158.

15. The U.S. Navy had evacuated the natives to Rongerik Atoll : The
documentary Radio Bikini (1987), directed by Robert Stone, includes remarkable
outtakes of AEC footage showing military personnel rehearsing how to best
pitch propaganda to the natives.

16. three-bomb atomic test series : Schwartz , Atomic Audit, 102. Operation
Crossroads cost an astonishing $1.3 billion in 1946 eleven months after the war’s
end, more than any subsequent test series. Crossroads involved 95 ships and
42,000 military and civilian personnel. It was a show of force.

17. a young man named Alfred O’Donnell : Interview with Alfred “Al”
O’Donnell.

18. “ In the face of intense fire ”: Air Force Historical Research Agency, 30
Reconnaissance Squadron (ACC), Lineage, Assignments, Stations, and Honors,
Major Richard S. Leghorn, http://www,afhra.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet,asp?
id=10193.

19. Curtis LeMav rarely smiled : Kozak, LeMay, iv.

20. five cents per bird : Ibid., 9.

21. “Caveman in a Jet Bomber” : I. F. Stone, The Best of I. F. Stone, 326-28.

22. LeMav was at Bikini to determine : Rhodes, Dark Sun, 261-62.

23. Operation Crossroads was a huge event : The New York Times described it
as the largest and “most stupendous single set of experiments in history.” Senator
Huffman called the test a “Roman holiday in the Pacific” and promised that the
“only important impression these tests are going to give the world is that the
United States is not done with war.” Members of the Southern Dairy Goat
Owners and Breeders Association recommended that the sheep being used
during the test be substituted with U.S. congressmen, on the grounds that good
goats were harder to find than congressmen were. In the days leading up to the
event, protesters picketed the White House with signs that read, bikini:

REHEARSAL FOR WORLD WAR THREE.

24. one million tons of battle-wearv steel : Fact sheet, Operation Crossroads,
Defense Nuclear Agency, Public Affairs Office, Washington, DC, April 5, 1984.

25. Alfred O’Donnell stood below deck : Interview with O’Donnell.

26. the DN-11 relay system : Interview with O’Donnell; copy of a handwritten
letter by Herbert Grier from O’Donnell’s collection.

27. What Leghorn witnessed horrified him : Interviews with Colonel Leghorn.

28. tossed up into the air like bathtub toys : United States Atomic Energy
Commission Memorandum for the Board, August 23, 1973, #718922, Naval
Vessels Sunk During Operation Crossroads; AEC film footage of the explosion,
Atomic Testing Museum library, Las Vegas, NV.

29. west of the Volga River : Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence
Agency, 22.

Leghorn believed: Interview with Colonel Leghorn.

30. what shipyards or missile-launch facilities : Ibid.; interview with Hervey
Stockman, who was the first man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2 spy
plane.

31. Halfway across the world : Rhodes, Dark Sun, 261.

32. chain-reacting atomic pile would go critical : O’Keefe, Nuclear Hostages,
134.

33. Joseph Stalin was developing another secret weapon : Author interview
with EG&G engineer.

34. secret weapon, called Hermes : Interview with Lisa Blevins, U.S. Army
public affairs officer, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico; “Report on
Hermes Missile Project,” Washington National Records Center, Record Group
156.

35. belonged to Adolf Hitler : Hunt, Secret Agenda, 27.

36. secret project called Operation Paperclip : Paperclip was a postwar
operation carried out by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, a special
intelligence office that reported to the director of intelligence in the War
Department. Today, this would be the equivalent of reporting to the intelligence
chief for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Most details about Project Paperclip remain
classified despite the government’s insistence otherwise. Paperclip began before
the war ended, and it was originally called Project Overcast and/or Project
Pajamas. It had two primary goals: to exploit the minds of German scientists for
American Cold War research projects and to keep the Russians from getting the
German scientists, no matter how heinous their war crimes might have been. It is
believed that at least sixteen hundred scientists were recruited by various U.S.
intelligence groups and brought, with their dependents, to the United States.
Paperclip had a number of secret, successor projects that remain classified as of
2011.

37. Wernher Von Braun : G-2 Paperclip “Top Secret” files, WNRC Record
Group 330. Also from FBI dossier “Wernher Magnus Maximilian Von Braun,
aka Freiherr Von Braun,” file 116-13038, 297 pages; also see Neufeld, Von
Braun.

38. Dr. Ernst Steinhoff : G-2 Paperclip “Top Secret” files, WNRC, Record
Group 319.

39. inside the two-million-square-acre : Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 169. Now
called the White Sands Missile Range, the facility is the largest military
installation in the country—the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
The first atomic bomb, Trinity, was exploded near the north boundary of the

range.

40. Dr. Steinhoff said nothing : Hunt, Secret Agenda, 27; Neufeld, Von Braun,
239.

41. terrifying citizens : “V-2 Rocket, Off Course, Falls Near Juarez,” El Paso
Times, May 30, 1947.

42. Allegations of sabotage : Army Intelligence, G-2 Paperclip, Memorandum
for the AC of S G-2, Intelligence Summary, Captain Paul R. Lutjens, June 6,
1947, RG 319, Washington National Records Center (WNRC), Suitland,
Maryland. Hunt, Secret Agenda, chapter 3; Major Lyman G. White, “Paperclip
Project, Ft. Bliss, Texas and Adjacent Areas,” MID 918.3, November 26, 1947.

43. “beating a dead Nazi horse” : In a March 1948 letter to the State
Department regarding “German scientists [who] were members of either the
Nazi Party or one or more of its affiliates,” Bosquet Wev, director of the Joint
Intelligence Objectives Agency, wrote, “[Responsible officials... have
expressed opinions to the effect that, in so far as German scientists are
concerned, Nazism no longer should be a serious consideration from a viewpoint
of national security when the far greater threat of Communism is now
jeopardizing the entire world. I strongly concur in this opinion and consider it a
most sound and practical view, which must certainly be taken if we are to face
the situation confronting us with even an iota of realism. To continue to treat
Nazi affiliations as significant considerations has been aptly phrased as ‘beating
a dead Nazi horse.’”

44. What made the aircraft extraordinary : Interview with EG&G engineer.

45. fighter jet : Interviews with Colonel Slater, Area 51 base commander
(1963-68), Chandler’s personal friend. Chandler relayed this story to Slater
decades after it happened.

46. The recovered craft looked nothing like a conventional aircraft : Interview
with EG&G engineer, who was an eyewitness.

47. Cyrillic alphabet had been stamped : Interview with EG&G engineer.

48. near the Alaskan border : Interview with EG&G engineer.

49. What if atomic energy propelled the Russian craft : Interview with EG&G

engineer.

50. Amerika Bomber : Myhra, The Horten Brothers and Their All-Wing
Aircraft, 217-20; interview with David Myhra, who interviewed both Horten
brothers, Walter in Germany and Reimar in Argentina, for hundreds of hours in
the 1980s.

51. Paperclip scientists... called on for their expertise : This is my defensible
speculation based on interviews with the EG&G engineer. The Paperclip group
attached to the project, I learned through sources with secondhand information,
allegedly included Von Braun, Ernst Steinhoff, and also Dr. Hubertus Strughold,
a former Nazi and, in 1947, a research doctor at the Aeromedical Laboratory at
Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas. While employed by the Third Reich,
Strughold was the leading expert on how the human body handles high altitude
during flight. During World War II, Strughold had been chief of staff of aviation
medicine for the German air force, or Luftwaffe. For more on Strughold, see
Bower, Paperclip Conspiracy, 214-323.

52. secreted away in a manner so clandestine : Interview with EG&G
engineer.

53. top secret project called Operation Harass : Jacobsen, U.S. Army
Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) FOIA request, “Horten Brothers
and Operation Harass.” The file was declassified by INSCOM beginning on July
6, 1994, CDR USAINSCOM FOl/PO Auth para 1-603 DOD 5200.1R, 358
pages. Notes for pages 38 through 62 refer to this record group.

54. testimony of America’s Paperclip scientists : Headquarters, Counter
Intelligence Corps Region I, 970th Counter Intelligence Corps, Detachment
European Command, APO-154, January 6, 1948, 92. “Scientists who have better
than average knowledge of the HORTEN brothers’ work are: (2) Lippisch, Prof.,
fnu, Wright Field, Ohio, U.S.A.” Dr. Lippisch was transferred to Wright Field,
along with his senior staff Ernst Sielaff and Dr. Ringleb, from
Luftfahrtforshungsandstalt Wien—a German aeronautical research institute for
the development of high-speed aircraft.

55. The manhunt was on : The earliest dated Operation Harass memo in the
file is from November 10, 1947, APO 189, Subject: Flying Saucers, 139. It
reads, “Considerable material has been gathered by the Air Materiel Command
WRIGHT FIELD, Ohio, concerning the appearance, description and functioning

of the object popularly known as the ‘Flying Saucer.’ A copy of the request of
the report from the Air Materiel Command is on file at this Headquarters, 2. The
opinion was expressed that some sort of object, such as the flying saucer, did
exist. At the present time, construction models are being built for wind tunnel
tests.” This, however, is clearly not the first memo. Here of the FOIA file, in
memo APO 134, January 2, 1948, a reference is made to an earlier letter, “RE:
HORTEN Brothers, SUBJECT: Flying Saucers, dated 28, October 1947.”

56. Walter and Reimar Horten... had somehow been overlooked : Interview
with David Myhra.

57. been a later-model Horten in the works : “HORTEN, Walter-” LKL:

A.V.V. Gottingen (14-5-46) “Expert on ‘flying-wing’ aircraft, including HO VIII
IX & X,” 155 (note there are two separate pages numbered 155).

58. Timothy Cooper filed a request for documents : Because the Flying Saucer
memos reveal that immediately after the crash at Roswell, the Army was seeking
information on aircraft made by German scientists and not by extraterrestrials,
the memos have been discounted by many ufologists as being Army intelligence
propaganda. In fact, they reveal an important clue in understanding the EG&G
engineer’s truth about the Roswell mystery, namely, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and perhaps the highest rank at Air Materiel Command knew the flying disc was
in fact a Russian vehicle of German design.

59. Extreme maneuverability and apparent ability to almost hover : Air
Intelligence [illegible] for alleged “Flying Saucer Type Air Craft,” 152-56.

60. American Paperclip scientists living at Wright Field : Headquarters Sub
Region Frankfurt, Counter Intelligence Corps Region III, APO 757, 4 February
1948, 71-72. “Leiber also stated that a Dr. Alexander LIPPISCH, who is at
present working at WRIGHT Field, Ohio, USA, is also familiar with the work of
the HORTON brothers.”

61. Messerschmitt test pilot named Fritz Wendel : Headquarters Counter
Intelligence Corps Region IV, 970th Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment
APO 407-A, US ARMY, IV-2574. Subj: WENDEL, Fritz, 1 March 1948, 6
pages. Includes Sheets I, II, III, and IV—Sketches made by WENDEL re
HORTEN aircraft; No. 179332, WENDEL, Fritz, “Ex-Luftwaffe Squadron
leader. Presently working for Graf Von Ledebur, French Intell [sic] officer in
Vienna Austria,” 56-63.

62. “very much like a round cake with a large sector cut out” : Memo, Secret,
Headquarters Berlin Command, Office of Military Government for Germany
(US), S-2 Branch, Subject “Flying Saucers,” 3 December 1947, 126; Drawing,
Directrix, Secret, 128.

63. Could it hover? : Ibid., 57.

64. if groups could fly tightly together : Ibid., 58.

65. “high speed escapement methods” : Ibid., 59.

66. Could the flying disc be remotely controlled? : Ibid., 58.

67. Did Wendel have any idea about the tactical purposes : Ibid.

68. a rocket engineer named Walter Ziegler : Memo, Secret, Headquarters
Counter Intelligence Corps Region IV, 970th Counter Intelligence Corps APO
407-A Subj: ZIEGLER, Walter Erich, 1 March 1948, 52-55.

69. four hundred men from his former rocket group : Ibid., 53. Ziegler called
the town “Kubischew,” and said it was located “east of Moscow... where they
are presently constructing rockets under Russian supervision.”

70. The Horten brothers had been found : Headquarters 970th Counter
Intelligence Corps Detachment European Command, APO 757, D-198239,
Subject Flying Saucers, dated 12 March 1948, 44.

71. “the Horten 13” : This is a transcription of a “report” originally written in
German cursive writing and translated by SFC Dale R. Blohm. It is missing a
cover page. The text suggests that the USG is making plans to hire “6 to 30”
German scientists to create for them the “Horten-Parabel.” It reads, “The
Discussions concerning the Project ‘Horten-ParabeF are finalized. The results
can be summed up in the following manner. 1). The Russians are in possession
of the relevant planes and will be supported by German specialists. The
construction series of the so called Horten 13 (Model with 2-TL (SIC) Power
Unit) should not be developed beyond the initial stages by the Russians.” At the
end of the memo, the writer concluded, “to begin work, we ask for exact orders
for the U.S. Army, for example timber work style, how many power units,
operating radius, additional load, crew size, weapons layout, etc,” 196-97, 202-
4.

72. “Walter Horten has admitted his contacts with the Russians” : Memo from
European Command Message Control Secret Priority, Ref S-3773, To: United
States Forces in Austria, for Director of Intelligence, 20 May 1948, 231; extracts
from Horten, Walter, From D-154654, “Walter HORTEN points out that the
possibility of the glider of parabolic design flown by a Russian pilot in 1925-
1926 at the Rhaen competitive race may have been developed into a flying
saucer. In the event the Russians further developed this glider, or, after the war,
installed into it jet units of the Junkers or BMW type, the result may be the
flying saucer,” 232-33.

73. stay at Wright-Patterson for approximately four years : Interview with
EG&G engineer.

Chapter Three: The Secret Base

Interviews: Colonel Leghorn, T. D. Barnes, Lieutenant Colonel Roger
Andersen, Millie Meierdierck, Bob Murphy, Ray Goudey, Edward Lovick

1. was sitting in his parlor : Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, 68.

2. paramour of Princess Caradja : Thomas, The Very Best Men, 103.

3. As for the mysterious office called OPC : CIA History Staff, “Office of
Policy Coordination 1948-1952,” 57 pages. Approved for release March 1997.

4. “ funds generated by the Marshall Plan ”: Bissell, Reflections of a Cold
Warrior, 68.

5. Leghorn went back to Washington : Interview with Colonel Leghorn.

6. as part of Operation Lusty : Samuel, American Raiders. Operation Lusty
(Luftwaffe Secret Technology) was the U.S. Army Air Forces’ effort to capture
and evaluate German aeronautical technology beginning at the end of World War
II.

7. Putt listened : Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence Agency, 35.

8. Whereas Putt was uninterested : P. Taubman, Secret Empire, 105.

9. Killian and Land reasoned : Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence
Agency, 27-37.

10. “impression of World War I as a cataclysm” : Bissell, Reflections of a
Cold Warrior, 4.

11. James Killian, who recruited Bissell : Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central
Intelligence Agency, 16. Bissell joined the Agency in late January 1954;
however, his first association with the Agency came in 1953 when he worked as
a contractor. On July 26, 1954, Eisenhower authorized Killian to recruit a panel
of experts to study what a U-2-type aircraft might accomplish. The group was
called the Technological Capabilities Panel. In August, the idea was formally
presented to Bissell. Ibid., 30.

12. a secret CIA test facility : There are several accounts of who went to

Groom Lake with Bissell on that historic first trip. I compile mine from Bissell’s
memoir and my interviews with Lockheed test pilot Ray Goudey.

13. Goudey had shuttled atomic scientists : Interview with Ray Goudey.

14. “ I recommended to Eisenhower ”: Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior,
102-3.

15. the tents would blow away : Interview with Ray Goudey.

16. to defend against rattlesnakes : Interview with Edward Lovick.

17. The same variable occurred : Interview with Tony Bevacqua.

18. a lot of time in a recliner : Interview with Ray Goudey.

19. Bob Murphy’s job : Interviews with Bob Murphy. The U-2 engine was a
P-37 specially designed by Connecticut engine maker Pratt and Whitney.

20. Mr. B.. as he was known to the men : Interview with Edward Lovick.

21. Hank Meierdierck : The stories of Hank Meierdierck, the man who trained
the U-2 pilots at Area 51, were relayed to me by his friends from the old days at
the Ranch as well as from his personal papers, which were made available to me
by his wife, Millie Meierdierck.

22. “unconventional way” : Killian, Sputnik, Scientists and Eisenhower, 82.
Killian wrote, “Eisenhower approved the development of the U-2 system, but he
stipulated that it should be handled in an unconditional way so that it would not
become entangled in the bureaucracy of the Defense Department or troubled by
rivalries among the services.” Also see Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior,

95.

23. hidden from Congress : Top Secret Memorandum of Conference with the
President 0810, 24 November 1954. “Authorization was sought from the
President to go ahead on a program to produce thirty, special high performance
aircraft at a cost of about $35 million. The President approved this action. Mr.
Allen Dulles indicated that his organization could not finance this whole sum
without drawing attention to it, and it was agreed that Defense would seek to
carry a substantial part of the financing.” From the Eisenhower Archives, DDE’s
Papers as President, Ann Whitman Diary Series, Box 3, ACW Diary, November
1954.

24. stand-alone organization : Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, 105.
Bissell wrote, “To preserve the secrecy and expeditiousness that Eisenhower and
Allen Dulles insisted on, I argued for removing the U-2 project from the
agency’s organizational chart and setting it up as a stand-alone organization. As
a result, the entire project became the most compartmented and self-contained
activity within the agency.”

25. five-page brief : Eisenhower was uniquely invested in Area 51 because the
success of the U-2 program, which came to be during his administration, was
critical to the nation’s security.

26. the Air Force was almost entirely left out : As recalled by General Leo
Geary, Bissell’s Air Force deputy, in an interview with Jonathan Lewis, tape
recording, Chevy Chase, MD, 11 February 1994; Bissell, Reflections of a Cold
Warrior, 100.

27. LeMav was, understandably, enraged : “Eventually President Eisenhower
settled the dispute.” Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence Agency, 60;
Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, 109.

28. the president’s decision : “I want this whole thing to be a civilian
operation,” the president wrote. “If uniformed personnel of the armed services of
the United States fly over Russia, it is an act of war—legally—and I don’t want
any part of it.’” From Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence Agency, 60.

29. Bob Murphy would often chat with George Pappas : Interview with Bob
Murphy.

30. Had Pappas been just thirty feet higher : From Hank Meierdierck’s
personal papers; Meierdierck located the crash remains from a U-2 he took out
on a search mission.

31. the CIA acknowledged the plane crash in 2002 : As part of a tribute given
by the U.S. Forest Service. The CIA did not, however, acknowledge that the
aircraft was traveling to Area 51; also see Kyril Plaskon, Silent Heroes.

32. security systems for Air Force One : EG&G, a Division of URS,
Albuquerque Operations Web site. “EG&G has provided security systems for
U.S. Government facilities: Department of Energy Headquarters, U.S. Bureau of
Engraving, Presidential AF-1 Hangar Complex, Rocky Flats [nuclear weapons

production facility in Colorado], Tooele [Utah, Army Depot for WMD].”

Chapter Four: The Seeds of a Conspiracy

Interviews: Lieutenant Colonel Tony Bevacqua, Edward Lovick, Ray
Goudey, A1 O’Donnell, Jim Freedman, Wayne Pendleton, T. D. Barnes

1. Area 51. reports of UFO sightings : Haines, “CIA’s Role,” 73.

2. U-2 look like a fiery flying cross : Interview with Tony Bevacqua; the
wingspan is 103 feet and the fuselage is 63 feet.

3. the crash at Roswell occurred : Hereafter, when I refer to the “crash at
Roswell,” I am referring to an aircraft, not a balloon, as has also been written.
While there was a balloon-borne radar-reflector project going on at White Sands
in the summer of 1947, this is not what crashed at Roswell. To learn about that
project and the balloon theory put forth by one of its participants, Charles B.
Moore, see Saler, Ziegler, and Moore, UFO Crash at Roswell.

4. Project Sign : U.S. Air Force Air Materiel Command, “Unidentified Aerial
Objects; Project SIGN”; Haines, “CIA’s Role,” 68.

5. Project Grudge : U.S. Air Force, Project Grudge and Blue Book, Reports
1-12. Since the declassification of Projects Saucer, Sign, Grudge, Twinkle, and
Blue Book, which began incrementally in the 1970s, the collection is housed in
the National Archives; see http://www.archives.gov/foia/ufos.html .

6. disliked technology in general : Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central
Intelligence Agency, 17, “High altitude reconnaissance of the Soviet Union did
not fit well into Allen Dulles’s perception of the proper role of an intelligence
agency. He tended to favor the classical form of espionage, which relied on
agents rather than technology.” Allen Dulles’s predilection to work with former
Nazis has become more obvious and more troubling as time goes by and
Paperclip files are slowly declassified. The last line in Dulles’s three-page CIA
biography, “Secret Security Information: Subject Allen W. Dulles 7/2-127,”
reads: “At any rate, the American policy in the postwar period as regards [to]
Germany has been directly and deeply influenced by MR. DUFLES. He has a
greater trust in the Germans than he has, for instance, in the French and the
Italians.”

7. The UFO division was placed : Office Memorandum, United States

Government, To: Acting Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, From:
Todos Odarenko, Chief, Physics and Electronics Division, SI, Subject, Current
Status of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOB) Projects, 17 December 1953.

8. Walter Bedell Smith : Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 4, 87, 122, 131.

9. included the flying disc retrieved at Roswell : This is my defensible
speculation based on interviews with the EG&G engineer and my understanding
of Bedell Smith’s role, particularly with James Forrestal, secretary of the Navy
during the war and the nation’s first secretary of defense, who committed suicide
on May 22, 1949.

10. Bedell Smith was the ambassador to the Soviet Union : CIA Center for the
Study of Intelligence, Directors and Deputy Directors of Central Intelligence,
Walter Smith, General, U.S. Army.

11. Governors Island. New York : National Archives Records Administration,
RG 338, Box 27, G-2 Section, Headquarters First Army, Governors Island, New
York, 4, New York, Case Files.

12. summarily rejected the idea that UFOs : There are several CIA documents,
declassified starting in 1996, that I base my interpretation of General Bedell
Smith’s attitude toward UFOs on during his tenure at CIA. All quotes come from
these documents: Central Intelligence Agency, Washington 25, D.C. Office of
the Director, ER-3-2809, Memorandum to Director, Psychology Strategy Board,
Subject Flying Saucers, 2 pages, signed Walter B. Smith Director, undated;
Memorandum for file OSI, Meeting of OSI Advisory Group on UFO, January 14
through 17, 1953, 3 pages; Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying
Objects 14-17 January 1953, Evidence Presented, 2 pages; CIA Scientific
Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, Comments and Suggestions of
UFO Panel, 19 pages; Minutes of Branch Chief’s Meeting of 11 August 1952, 3
pages; Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, From Deputy Director,
Intelligence, Subject Flying Saucers, Dated September 7, 1952, 5 pages.

13. flying discs appeared in many different forms of art :
http://www.crystalinks.com/ufohistory.html .

14. like the boy who cried wolf : Memo, CIA Scientific Advisory Panel on
Unidentified Flying Objects, Comments and Suggestions of UFO Panel, 10.
“Potential related dangers, c. Subjectivity of public to mass hysteria and greater

vulnerability to possible enemy psychological warfare.”

15. “hysterical mass behavior” : Haines, “CIA’s Role,” 72.

16. the publishers of Life magazine : H. B. Darrach and Robert Ginna, “Have
We Visitors from Space?” Life magazine, April 7, 1952.

17. originally called Project Saucer : Haines, “CIA’s Role,” 67-68.

18. Green Fireballs : Project Twinkle, Final Report, November 27, 1951.

19. curious members of Congress : Interview with Stanton Friedman.

20. Air Force concluded for the National Security Council : U.S. Air Force
Air Materiel Command, “Unidentified Aerial Objects; Project SIGN.”

21. UFO convention in Los Angeles : “Minutes of the Meeting of Civilian
Saucer Investigations.”

22. Dr, Riedel had been working on Hitler’s bacteria bomb : Neufeld, Von
Braun, 206.

23. There were rumors of “problems ”: Ibid., 216-22.

24. “ going to execute a planned ‘hoax’ ”: CIA Office Memorandum to
Assistant for Operations, OSI, From Chief Contact Division, CO, Date: 9
February 1953, Subject California Committee for Saucer Investigations.

25. set off alarms in its upper echelons : Special National Intelligence
Estimate 100-2-57, No. 19, “Soviet Capabilities for Deception,” Submitted by
the Director of Central Intelligence, 16 pages. Based on recommendations made
by the Technical Capabilities Panel, chaired by Dr. Killian, the recommendation
read: “We need to examine intelligence data more broadly, or to invent some
new technique, for the discovery of hoaxes.”

26. trailing a colleague of Riedel named George P. Sutton : Curiously, the CIA
document referenced above names George Sutton as a Riedel colleague and
ufologist. Was he a plant? Was he turned? Did he reform on his own? According
to the Smithsonian Papers, National Air and Space Museum, Archives Division,
MRC 322, Washington, DC, 20560, in the G. Paul Sutton collection: “George
Paul Sutton (1920-) was an aerospace engineer and manager. He received
degrees from Los Angeles City College (AA, 1940) and the California Institute

of Technology (BS, 1942; MS [ME], 1943) before going to work as a
development engineer for the Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation.
He remained at Rocketdyne into the late 1960s, while also sitting as Hunsaker
Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at MIT (1958-59) and serving as Chief
Scientist, Advanced Research Projects Agency [ARPA] and Division Director,
Institute of Defense Analysis for the Department of Defense (1959-60).
Following his work at Rocketdyne he joined the technical staff at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory.”

27. Agency should handle reports of UFOs : Odarenko, Office Memorandum,
August 8, 1955.

28. Allen Dulles as an arrogant public servant : Letter from Director of
Central Intelligence Allen Dulles to Congressman Gordon Scherer, October 4,
1955, ER-7-4372A.

Chapter Five: The Need-to-Know

Interviews: Colonel Slater, Hervey Stockman, Ken Collins, Frank Murray,
Tony Bevacqua, Colonel Pizzo, Edward Lovick, Ray Goudey

1. protocols that are also top secret : Correspondence with Cargill Hall. The
Federation of American Scientists provides a nonclassified Central Intelligence
Directive from 1995 at http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/dcidl-19.

2. bemoaned the president’s science advisers : Welzenbach, “Science and
Technology,” 16.

3. Sage Control : Interview with Colonel Slater.

4. “It was like something out of fiction” : Interview with Hervey Stockman.
Also sourced in this section with Stockman are passages from his compelling
oral history, a project that was spearheaded by his son Peter Stockman and the
results of which are “Conversations with Colonel Hervey S. Stockman,” edited
by Ann Paden and Earl Haney (not published).

5. The identities of the pilots were equally concealed : Interviews with Ken
Collins, Frank Murray, Tony Bevacqua, and Hervey Stockman.

6. NII-88 : Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising, 22-23, 26-30, 39-44, 98, 102;
Harford, Korolev, 77-80, 93, 95, 117. Also called Scientific Research Institute-
88, which included the former NII-1, per Stalin on May 13, 1946.

7. Stalin declared Sergei Korolev’s name a state secret : Harford, Korolev, 1.

8. multibillion-dollar espionage platforms : Ibid., 93. Harford quotes Gyorgi
Vetrov, Korolev’s Russian biographer, as saying about NII-88’s radical
transformation: “Hardly anyone suspected that the plant was destined to become
a production base for such complicated and demanding technologies as rockets
and space vehicles for traveling to other plants.”

9. Russia’s version of America’s Paperclip scientists : Ibid., 75. In addition to
the Army intelligence CIC memos that I cited earlier regarding Fritz Wendel,
Harford wrote “perhaps as many as 5,000 skilled Germans... were literally
kidnapped and shipped with their families, by trains, freight cars and trucks to
workplaces outside of Moscow.”

10. Operation Dragon Return : Goodman, Spying on the Nuclear Bear, 177.

11. “cannot cope with contingencies” : Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising, 81.

12. LeMav scrambled nearly a thousand B-47 bombers : Ibid., 25. The
entirety of these Arctic overflights is still classified. Missions are written about
in Burrows, By Any Means Necessary, 208-15, and in Bamford, Body of Secrets,
35-36. The National Security Agency cosponsored many of the ELINT
missions. In Secret Empire, Philip Taubman wrote, “At least 252 air crewmen
were shot down on spy flights between 1950 and 1970, most directed against the
Soviet Union. It is certain that 90 of these men survived, for they were either
rescued by American forces or their capture but the Soviet Union or another
country was confirmed. But the fate of 138 men is unknown,” 47.

13. top secret missions as part of Operation Home Run : Interview with
Colonel Sam Pizzo.

14. “ Soviet leaders may have become convinced ”: CIA Staff, “Analysis of
the Soviet Union 1947-1999,” 27.

15. President Eisenhower was gravely concerned : Top Secret Memorandum
of Conference with the President, July 8, 1959. With Dulles and Bissell present
at the meeting, USAF Brigadier General A. J. Goodpaster observed, “There
remains in the President’s mind the question of whether we were getting to the
point where we must decide if we are trying to prepare to fight a war, or trying to
prevent one.” Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alphabetical
Subseries, Box 15, Intelligence Matters.

16. Richard Bissell promised the president : Oral history interview with
Richard M. Bissell Jr. by Theodore A. Wilson and Richard D. McKinzie, East
Hartford, Connecticut, July 9, 1971.

17. Alexander Orlov related : Orlov, “The U-2 Program,” 5-14.

18. “ We will shoot down uninvited guests ”: Ibid., 7.

19. he would be even more enraged : Ibid.; Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising,
124-35.

20. CIA men armed with machine guns : Interview with Hervey Stockman.

21. Eisenhower’s cows : P. Taubman, Secret Empire, 167.

22. Stockman approached Russia’s submarine city : Stockman also recalled in
our interview, “This was good solid proof that what so many had thought to be
over there, that there was this huge, dominant, strategic bomber force for the
Soviet Union, [proved] not to be there.”

23. Herbert Miller wrote a triumphant memo : Declassified in 2000, the memo
is called Top Secret Memorandum for: Project Director, Subject: Suggestions re
the Intelligence Value of Aquatone, July 17, 1956. Three more U-2 flights
followed Hervey Stockman’s. On July 10, 1956, the Soviet Union filed a note of
protest. Later that same day, Eisenhower ordered Bissell to stop all overflights
until further notice. Miller’s memo summarizes the intelligence value of the U-2
flights for the president and argues that the danger of stopping them was far
greater than of continuing them.

24. Khrushchev told his son. Sergei : W. Taubman, Khrushchev, 443.

25. “lost enthusiasm” for the CIA’s aerial espionage program : Pedlow and
Welzenbach, Central Intelligence Agency, 110. Further, the president noted that
if Russia were to make these kinds of incursions over U.S. airspace, “The
reaction would be drastic.” Also from Andrew J. Goodpaster, memorandum on
the record, July 19, 1956. The president expressed concern that if the public
found out about the overflights, they would be shocked. “Soviet protests would
be one thing, any loss of confidence by our own people would be quite another.”

26. he hired a team to analyze : Interview with Edward Lovick.

27. painting the U-2 was a bad idea : Ibid.

28. Air Force transferred money over to the CIA : Pedlow and Welzenbach,
Central Intelligence Agency, 77.

29. Among those selected : Interview with Tony Bevacqua.

30. The next test was a freezing experiment : Interview with Bevacqua. Cold
experiments were presented in the Nuremberg doctors’ trials as “The Effect of
Freezing on Human Beings,” the purpose of which was for Nazi doctors to
determine at what temperature a human subject dies from heart failure when
being frozen.

31. aviation medicine school at Wright-Patterson : Hunt, Secret Agenda, 10,
16, 19, 21. Hunt wrote that during the war, Lieutenant General Donald “Putt

gathered the Germans together and, without approval from higher authorities in
the War Department, promised them jobs at Wright Field,” sourcing her
interview with Lieutenant General Putt; “Report on Events and Conditions
Which Occurred During Procurement of Foreign Technical Men for Work in the
U.S.A.,” September 25, 1945, Department of the Air Force, History of the AAF
Participation in Project Paperclip, Appendix, May 1945-March 1947.

32. previously worked at Nazi concentration camps : Bower, Paperclip
Conspiracy, 214-323. Colonel Harry Armstrong, a surgeon with the U.S. Eighth
Air Force, petitioned for the Nazi doctors to come to America after the war and
“at the end of his distinguished career, in 1976, he would boast that the thirty-
four German aviation doctors he brought to America had saved ‘a great many
millions of dollars.”’ Armstrong had obtained approval from Eisenhower for an
operation to “exploit certain uncompleted German aviation medicine research
projects.” Also see Staff Memo to Members of the Advisory Committee on
Human Radiation Experiments, “Post-World War II Recruitment of German
Scientists—Project Paperclip,” April 5, 1995 (as per President Clinton). The
committee obliquely concludes: “Follow-up Research. The staff believes this
trail should be followed with more research before conclusions can be drawn
about the Paperclip scientists... It is possible that still-classified intelligence
documents could shed further light on these connections.”

33. conducting barbaric experiments : In Linda Hunt’s Secret Agenda, chapter
5, “Experiments in Death,” she chronicles several Nazi scientists who became
Paperclips. Siegfried Ruff and Hermann Becker-Freyseng conducted death
experiments on prisoners at Dachau, placing them in a pressure chamber that
simulated high altitudes of up to 39,260 feet. “The U.S. military still viewed
Ruff and Becker-Freyseng as valuable assets, despite their connection to these
crimes. They were even employed under Paperclip [at the AAF Aero Medical
Center in Heidelberg, Germany] to continue the same type of research that had
resulted in the murder of Dachau prisoners,” Hunt wrote. Ruff and Becker-
Freyseng never got permanent U.S. Paperclip jobs; both were eventually arrested
and tried at Nuremberg. Ruff was acquitted, Becker-Freyseng was convicted and
given a twenty-year prison sentence. Another notable case was that of Konrad
Schaefer. In an effort to study if Luftwaffe pilots could survive on seawater,
Schaefer forced prisoners to drink seawater until they went mad from thirst. He
then punctured their livers in order to sample fluid and blood. Schaefer was tried
at Nuremberg and acquitted, at which point the United States hired him as a

Paperclip. “When he arrived at San Antonio in 1950,” wrote Hunt, “he was
touted as ‘the leading German authority on thirst and desalinization of
seawater.”’

34. six hundred million still-classified : Pauline Jelinek, “U.S. Releases Nazi
Papers,” Associated Press, November 2, 1999. But in reality, this number is just
a guess, since documents can be hidden inside agencies that are still classified
(as the National Reconnaissance Office, NRO, was from 1961-1992); Nazi War
Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records, April 2007. In 1998,
President Clinton signed into law the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which
“required the U.S. Government to locate, declassify, and release in their entirety,
with few exceptions, remaining classified records about war crimes committed
by Nazi Germany and its allies.” An interagency working group was created to
oversee this work. Steven Garfinkel, acting chair of this five-year effort, wrote:
“the IWG has ensured that the public finally has access to the entirety of the
operational files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), totaling 1.2 million
pages; over 114,200 pages of CIA materials; over 435,000 pages from FBI files;
20,000 pages from Army Counterintelligence Corps files; and over 7 million
additional pages of records.” Garfinkel makes no mention of any Atomic Energy
Commission files or the files of private contractors inside the Atomic Energy
Commission, such as EG&G, who control documents classified as Restricted
Data (RD).

35. U-2 was as radical and as unorthodox : Interview with Tony Bevacqua.

36. Edgerton’s famous stop-motion photographs : Available for viewing at the
Edgerton Center at MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 4-405, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, as well as online at Edgerton.org; Grundberg, “H.E. Edgerton,

86, Dies, Invented Electronic Flash,” New York Times, January 5, 1990.

37. Kenneth J. Germeshausen : Joan Cook, “Kenneth Germeshausen, 83,

Dies; Was Nuclear and Radar Pioneer,” New York Times, August 21, 1990.
Information on Germeshausen also comes from the Kenneth J. Germeshausen
Center for the Law of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Franklin Pierce
Law Center; MIT archives; author interviews with A1 O’Donnell, Jim Freedman.

38. the most highly classified engineering jobs : Interviews with former
EG&G employees A1 O’Donnell, Jim Freedman, Wayne Pendleton, T. D.

Barnes, and others.

39. EG&G agreed to set up a radar range : Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central
Intelligence Agency, 130. It is also interesting to note that in the footnotes in this
CIA monograph, the source for information regarding the location of EG&G’s
radar range is redacted, only that they are from Office of Special Activity (OSA)
records. Written requests to the CIA were denied.

40. Lockheed test pilot Robert Sieker : Among pilots living at Area 51, a
debate ensued about the cause of Sieker’s crash. U-2 pilots Tony Bevacqua and
Ray Goudey told me they believe pilot error caused Sieker’s crash. According to
them, he was known to open up his faceplate and take bites of candy bars during
flight. Bevacqua himself flew a U-2 dirty bird and lived to tell the tale. Many of
these mission flights were made over Asia. Lovick maintains it was the Boston
Group’s paint that caused the aircraft to overheat.

41. “ As it beeped in the sky ”: Killian, Sputnik, Scientists and Eisenhower, 7.

42. Killian and Bissell found themselves : Welzenbach, “Science and
Technology,” 18. “Killian had confidence in Bissell. A special relationship
existed between Killian and Bissell going back to 1942.”

43. formidable top secret billion-dollar spy plane : Top Secret Memorandum
of Conference with the President, July 20, 1959. “It will have a radar cross
section so low that the probability of hostile detection and successful tracking
would be very low. It would have a 4000-mile range at mach 4, with 90,000 feet
altitude.” Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alphabetical Subseries,
Box 15, Intelligence Matters.

44. Advancing science and technology for military purposes : The Advanced
Research Projects Agency was Eisenhower’s response to Sputnik, “a high-level
defense organization to formulate and execute R&D projects that would expand
the frontiers of technology beyond the immediate and specific requirements of
the Military Services and their laboratories.” In 1972, ARPA became DARPA.
The D denotes Defense.

Chapter Six: Atomic Accidents

Interviews with Richard Mingus, A1 O’Donnell, Jim Freedman, Dr. Wheelon,
Troy Wade, Darwin Morgan, Stephen M. Younger

1. involved thirty consecutive nuclear explosions : Defense Threat Reduction
Agency, fact sheet, Operation Plumbbob: “Operation Plumbbob, the sixth series
of atmospheric nuclear tests conducted within the continental United States,
consisted of 24 nuclear detonations and six safety tests. The Plumbbob series
lasted from April 24 to Oct. 7, 1957, and involved about 14,000 Department of
Defense (DoD) personnel.”

2. airplane transporting an atomic bomb would crash : Atomic Energy
Commission, Summary of Project 57, the First Safety Test of Operation
Plumbbob, report to the General Manager by the Director, Division of Military
Application, 24.

3. the perfect place to do this was Area 51 : Ref. Sym 5112-(127), Appendix
A, Administrative Committee Report, J. D. Shreve Jr., Sandia Corporation
(seven pages, no date). “B. Area Chosen (clockwise perimeter) (Groom Mine
Map) Start at intersection of 89 with north NTS boundary; follow 89 north to 51
(off map); 90 east on 51 to 04, south on 04 to Watertown (north) boundary,
thence west to 95, south to NTS line, and finally west along NTS line to 89.
More simply, it is the rectangle of land (1) bounded north and south by grids 51
and an extension of the north NTS edge respectively, (2) bounded east and west
by grids 04 and 89 respectively, (3) excluding all area assigned to Watertown,”

5.

4. “ relinquished for 20.000 years ”: Operation Plumbbob, Summary Report,
Test Group 57, Nevada Test Site, Extracted Version, May-October 1957, ITR-
1515 (Extracted Version), 17.

5. “no preexisting contamination” : Minutes, First General Meeting, the 57
Project, January 18, 1957, at Sandia Corporation, Red. Sym 5112-(127),
declassified 8/9/83.

6. “a safety test” : Memo dated April 2, 1957, LAV-57-33 Atomic Energy
Commission, Las Vegas Branch, Office of the Branch Chief; also see Safety

Experiments, November 1955-March 1958, Defense Nuclear Agency, United
States Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Tests, Nuclear Test Personnel Review,
Report Number DNA 6030.

7. dispute was over eight dead cows : The University of Tennessee
Agricultural Experiment Station, Knoxville, November 30, 1953, #404942,
Stewart Brothers, Las Vegas, Nevada. Through courtesy of Joe Sanders of AEC,
1-5.

8. The commission had paid the Stewarts : Memo to Dr. W. S. Johnson,
Section Leader, Test Operations Section, University of California, Los Alamos
Scientific Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, October 20, 1953, #4049641.

9. aerial inspection of Groom Lake : Col. E. A. Blue, DMA/AEC; J. D.

Shreve Jr., SC, W. Allaire (ALO), M. Cowan (SC) all inspected the area from the
air on a special flight prior to January 18.

10. “60 to 80 cattle who hadn’t gotten the word” : Minutes, hirst General
Meeting, the 57 Project, January 18, 1957, at Sandia Corporation, Red. Sym
5112-(127), 3.

11. excluded from official Nevada Test Site maps : Ref. Sym 5112-(127)
Appendix A, Administrative Committee Report, J. D. Shreve Jr., Sandia
Corporation (seven pages, no date). “It remains undecided whether Area 13 is
considered on-site or off-site so far as NTS is concerned... This is very
important to rule on soon.” Ultimately, it was decided to exclude Area 13 from
all maps and it remains this way on declassified maps today because Area 13 lies
inside Area 51. Denoting it on a map would lead to questions that the Atomic
Energy Commission does not want asked.

12. nuclear warhead was flown : Ibid., 6. “It will be requested that weapon be
flown to Yucca Lake air strip March 15, transferred to Building 11 for storage
awaiting ready date for the shot. Checkout would be done in Building 10 and the
unit moved from there to Area 13 (requested designation for site) for firing.”

13. Richard Mingus was tired : Interviews with Richard Mingus.

14. America’s first dirty bomb : Operation Plumbbob, Summary Report, Test
Group 57, Nevada Test Site, Extracted Version, May-October 1957, ITR-1515
(Extracted Version), 85 pages.

15. Pacific Proving Ground : General information comes from Buck, History
of the Atomic Energy Commission; O’Keefe, Nuclear Hostages; Fehner and
Gosling, Battlefield of the Cold War.

16. made its zigzag course : Fehner and Gosling, Origins of the Nevada Test
Site, 39.

17. arguing for an atomic bombing range : Ibid., 46-47.

18. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project : “History of the Air Force
Special Weapons Center 1 January-30 June 1957.” Department of Defense,

DNA 1. 950210.019, declassified with deletions 2/2/95.

19. code-named Project Nutmeg : Bugher, Review of Project Nutmeg,
#404131.

20. “ The optimum conditions ”: Fehner and Gosling, Battlefield of the Cold
War, 37.

21. the goal of fostering competition : Interview with Dr. Bud Wheelon; also
see Nevada Test Organization, Background Information on Nevada Nuclear
Tests, Office of Test Information, July 15, 1957, #403243, 25.

22. most ambitious series : Plumbbob Series 1957, Technical Report, Defense
Nuclear Agency 6005F, DARE Tracking 48584, 60-75.

23. Delta, nothing more : Interview with Richard Mingus.

24. scientists really had no clear idea : Safety Experiments, November 1955-
March 1958, Defense Nuclear Agency, United States Atmospheric Nuclear
Weapons Tests, Nuclear Test Personnel Review, Report Number DNA 6030.

25. Workers set up : Ref. Sym 5112-(127) Appendix B, Particle Physics
Committee Report, M. Cowan, Sandia Corporation Presiding (nine pages, no
date). This document refers to various objectives of the particle physics program,
an “experimental approach” to fallout collection, “balloon born precipitators,”
air samplers on the ground, collection of fallout trays. It described how “some
small plywood shacks with open windows and doors will be constructed in the
fallout array. Air and surface contamination levels will be measured within the
structures and compared to readings on the outside.”

26. “ stocked with radiation equipment and protective clothing ”: Plumbbob

Series 1957, Technical Report, Defense Nuclear Agency 6005F, DARE Tracking
48584, 60-75, 316.

27. Mother Nature’s emissary : Interviews with Richard Mingus and A1
O’Donnell, who introduced me to Mueller’s widow.

28. Project 57 balloons broke loose : Telex TWX 01A 2008242, From Reeves
Attention Gen AD Starbird, 1957 Apr 20 AM 3:39; also see “Feasibility of
Weapon Delivery By Free Balloons,” OSTI ID: 10150708; Legacy ID:
DE98056381, 34 pages.

29. hand-fired by an employee from EG&G : Operation Plumbbob, Summary
Report, Test Group 57, Nevada Test Site, Extracted Version, May-October 1957,
ITR-1515 (EX). Sandia Corporation, Albuquerque, NM, October 10, 1958. “At
0350 PST. April 24, a surface charge of 110 pounds of stick dynamite was fired
1,000 feet east of Zone C (as position 42-61) to verify predictions of cloud
height. Timing and firing circuits were the ultimate in simplicity; the weapon
was hand fired by EG&G at the Test Group Director’s instruction.”

30. fallout was to the north : Ibid., 55 (6.1., Weather Observations). The
weather was meticulously recorded, which is ironic given how “fast and loose”
everything else was running out at the test site, as stated by an EG&G employee
who also worked as a liaison to the Pentagon. “April 10, 1957. Hodographs
during the period 2100 to 2330 PST showed that satisfactory conditions existed
at 2100 PST, but a recommendation for cancellation was made after the wind
shifted to northwest on the 2300 PST soundings. April IF, [sic] 1957.
Satisfactory wind conditions existed at 0441 PST, but the morning inversion
broke more quickly than expected. By 0530 PST, winds were too strong and the
shear had disappeared, forcing cancellation. April 20, 1957, Intermittent light
showers began at 2330 PST on the 19th and continued through the remainder of
the night and following morning. Hodographs indicated that satisfactory winds
existed during this period, but moisture on the instrumentation forced
cancellation. April 24, 1957. Scattered middle clouds were observed and a
moderate dew formed during the night. The sequence of wind changes from
0415 to 0756 is shown by the hodographs. The shot was fired at 0627 PST.”

31. The bomb was indeed dirty : In June of 1982, Sandia Corporation
produced an extracted 102-page report on the results of its dirty bomb or
plutonium-contamination effects study on Project 57 for the director of the

Defense Nuclear Agency, in lieu of a proposed cleanup of Area 13 (see chapter
18). Information in this chapter comes from portions of that extracted study. The
stated objectives of the project “were to estimate the immediate and long-term
distribution of plutonium and gain an understanding of how this distribution
comes about, to conduct a biomedical evaluation of plutonium-laden
environments, to investigate relevant methods of decontamination, and to
evaluate alpha field survey instruments and monitoring procedures.” And yet
Area 13 soil decontamination was not even considered for twenty-five years.

32. “extract” of the original report : The full, still-classified document,
originally prepared by Sandia Corporation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in
October of 1958, is called ITR-1515.

33. “ the alpha half-life of plutonium-239 ”: Ibid., 17 (“Motivation and
Mission, 1.1 Historical Resume”). The text reads: “once in the stomach, their
stay in the body is short, for they are excreted as an inert material with virtually
no body assimilation. Inhalation is a different mechanism entirely and one which
presents a considerable threat. Any particle small enough to reach the lower
respiratory tract apparently has an excellent chance of clinging to alveolar
surfaces and staying to do radiation damage... One cannot outlive the influence,
because the alpha half life of plutonium-239 is of the order of 20,000 years.”

34. “ respirable plutonium remarkably far downwind ”: Ibid., 7 (“Foreword,
Abstract”).

35. “ earthworms moved 18 tons of soil ”: Ibid., 101 (8.6, “A New Program”).
“Finally, Dr. Kermit Larson agreed to exploit an idea which grew out of
discussions among participants in the anniversary measurements—earthworms.
Compton’s Encyclopedia reports that the renowned Charles Darwin studied an
acre of garden in which he claimed 53,000 hard-working earthworms moved 18
tons of soil. Translocation of soil, the possibility that earthworm body chemistry
may vary plutonium form, etc., could turn out to be significant influences,
intentional or unintentional, in the rehabilitation of a weapon-accident
environment.”

36. Pauling said : The quotes in this two-page section, and also the newspaper
quotes here , are from the extensive newspaper archive collection located in the
Atomic Testing Museum library reading room in Las Vegas, Nevada.

37. The Pentagon wondered : Fehner and Gosling, Battlefield of the Cold War,

159-82.

38. caused Area 51 personnel : Interview with Richard Mingus.

39. “ the Indoctrination Project : DNA 6005F, Plumbbob Series 1957, United
States Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Tests, Nuclear Test Personnel Review,
Chapter 4, Exercise Desert Rock VII and VIII Programs, 81, 96.

40. Committee on Human Resources : Memorandum, Members of the
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, September 8, 1994,
“Human Experiments in Connection with the Atomic Bomb Tests,” attachment
5, item 10.

41. “ mythical attack by an aggressor force ”: During the Hood nuclear bomb,
the Marine Corps conducted coordinated air-ground assault maneuvers that
included helicopter airlifts and tactical air support; “Exercise Desert Rock VII-
VIII, Operation Plumbbob,” Defense Nuclear Agency 4747F.

42. Mingus saw that a large swath of the desert was on fire : Interview with
Mingus.

43. Area 51 had become uninhabitable : Interview with Richard Mingus; also
Office Memorandum, United States Government, Observed Damage at
Watertown, Nevada, following the Sixth Nuclear shot of Plumbbob, July 9,
1957. R. A. Gilmore, Off-Site Rad-Safe, NTO, #0150371.

Chapter Seven: From Ghost Town to Boomtown

Interviews: T. D. Barnes, Peter Merlin, A1 O’Donnell, Richard Mingus, Jim
Freedman, Ed Lovick, Tony Bevacqua, Ray Goudey, Ernie Williams, Harry
Martin, Colonel Slater, Frank Murray

1. measuring fallout with Geiger counters in hand : Interview with T. D.
Barnes; Operation Plumbbob Projects and Reports: Program 2, Project 2.2.,
Neutron Induced Activities in Soil Elements WT-1411; Project 2.5 Initial
Gamma Radiation Intensity and Neutron-Induced Gamma Radiation of NTS Soil
WT-1414.

2. dressed in white lab coats and work boots : Photographs viewed at the
Atomic Testing Museum library, Las Vegas.

3. from pinhead particles to pencil-size pieces of steel : DNA 6005F,
Plumbbob Series 1957, United States Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Tests,
Nuclear Test Personnel Review, Chapter 4, Exercise Desert Rock VII and VIII
Programs, Civil Effects Test Group, Fallout Studies, 204-247; AEC Research
and Development Report BNWL-481-1, 113 pages.

4. surprise of the nuclear scientists : McPhee, Curve of Binding Energy, 166-
67.

5. could locate them with magnets : Roadrunners Internationale newsletter,
August 1, 2009, 34th edition. From the personal diary of Dan Sheahan, owner
and operator of the Groom Mine, provided to the Roadrunners Internationale by
his great-granddaughter Lisa Heawood.

6. weapons planners moved ahead : Interviews with A1 O’Donnell, Richard
Mingus, and Jim Freedman. There was a nuclear test ban moratorium on the
horizon, which meant that all weapons tests were scheduled to end on October
31, 1958. At the test site, weapons engineers worked at a frenzied pace to finish
as many nuclear tests as they could before the deadline.

7. the animals observed : An anonymous eyewitness related to me the horror
of watching a dying horse seek water at Area 51. The AEC has never
declassified its animal observations, which I understand are extensive. In an
AEC document released to the public on July 15, 1957, entitled “Responsibility

for U.S. Nuclear Weapons Programs,” in a section called “Operating Controls,”
it is stated that “cattle and horses grazing within a few miles of the detonation
suffered skin deep beta radiation burns on their hides (1952 and 1953 series)
with no effect on their breeding value and no effect on the cattle’s beef quality.
Radiation fallout more than a few miles from detonation has been quite harmless
to humans, animals or crops.” In The Day We Bombed Utah, John G. Fuller
presents the opposite argument.

8. emergency landing on the former U-2 airstrip : Interview with Peter Merlin.

9. Edward Lovick was standing on : Interview with Edward Lovick.

10. grandfather of stealth : Before working on the A-12, Lovick’s first job at
Skunk Works was to try to reduce the radar reflections being bounced back from
the U-2 to the Soviet radar systems. With Area 51 still shuttered from atomic
fallout, the physicist’s first efforts took place at a remote hangar in the north
corner of Edwards Air Force Base in California. There, Lovick and colleagues
spent hours coming up with all kinds of antiradar schemes: “It was our job to
invent something that would neither compromise the aircraft’s height, nor allow
its hydraulic system to overheat as had happened with Sieker. Kelly Johnson had
a rule: one pound of extra weight applied to the aircraft would reduce its altitude
by one foot. This meant our camouflage coating couldn’t exceed a quarter of an
inch and had to weigh as little as possible.”

11. aircraft would be radically different : Interviews with Ed Lovick, Dr.
Wheelon, T. D. Barnes. Other federal agencies were also secretly experimenting
with supersonic flight, but not sustained flight at Mach 3. The Air Force, NASA,
and the Navy were involved in the experimental X-15, a hypersonic airplane that
would lay the groundwork for travel into space. But the X-15 was boosted off
the back of a mother ship, whereas the Agency’s new plane would leave the
tarmac on its own power and return to the base the same way.

12. twenty-second window : Peebles, Dark Eagles, 51.

13. it loses precision and speed : Interview with Dr. Wheelon.

14. minutiae involving radar returns : Jones, The Wizard War. Lovick spent
hours describing for me the fundamental concepts of radar, which is an acronym
for radio detection and ranging, which first came into being in 1904 when a
German engineer named Christian Hulsmeyer figured out that electromagnetic

waves could be used to identify, or “see,” a metal ship floating in dense fog. It
didn’t take long for the military to realize the inherent value of radar as a way to
detect large, moving metal objects otherwise invisible to the naked eye. This was
especially true for ships and airplanes, two key means of transport in twentieth-
century warfare.

15. fourteen-vear-old children were doing in 1933 : Interview with Lovick. By
high school, Lovick had created a radio receiver from scrap metal, vacuum
tubes, and discarded radio parts which enabled him “to detect signals a hundred
miles away, which gave me the intense feeling of discovering something that I
did not previously have evidence as being there.”

16. the Archangel- 1 : Robarge, Archangel, 4-5. Archangel is a term meaning
“an angel of high rank” and it is also a port city in northwestern Russia, home to
many Soviet radar stations that would one day be trying to track the A-12.

17. fifty Skunk Works employees returned to Area 51 : Ibid., 6.

18. “ build a full scale mockup ”: Johnson, History of the Oxcart Program, 5.

19. code-named Titania : United States Nuclear Tests July 1945 through
September 1992 DOE/NV-209-REV 15, 144. The bomb was named after a
satellite of the planet Uranus.

20. Each member of Lovick’s crew : Interview with Lovick.

21. “Ike wants an airplane from Mandrake the magician” : Rich, Skunk Works,
198.

22. “ by adding the chemical compound cesium ”: Johnson, History of the
Oxcart Program, 4. Johnson wrote: “we proposed the use of cesium additive to
the fuel. This was first brought up by Mr. Ed Lovick of ADP, its final
development was passed over to P&W.” Lovick recalls traveling to Pratt and
Whitney’s research center in Florida where the aircraft engines were being
tested. “I realized that I had utilized theory that applied to thermal ionization of
gases and would need to use parameters appropriate to electron emission from
hot solid surfaces. Our results indicated that we were dealing with mixtures of
the two states but we did not know how to determine how much of each kind of
material, gas or solid, was involved in the production of the ionization that we
measured. The results were encouraging, but we needed to know more. So we

were moved to much better facilities at the P. & W. Willgoos Turbine Laboratory
in East Hartford, Connecticut.” It was there that the problem was solved.

23. Oxcart being the fastest : CIA Document EO 12958 3.3(b) Oxcart Facts:
A-12 Specifications; A-12 Experience Record (as of July 10, 1967). Note that in
November of 1961, the X-15 rocket plane flew Mach 6, or 4,092 mph. At the
time of this meeting, the CIA thought they were building the fastest airplane in
the world, which technically it was, because the X-15 didn’t take off on its own
power. As per interviews with T. D. Barnes, who worked on both projects.

24. Area 51 was back in business : Parangosky, The Oxcart Story, 3 (per Dr.
Wheelon, Parangosky was the true author of this seminal work on Oxcart; any
other name was a pseudonym). The contract was officially signed on February
11, 1960.

25. the CIA hired work crews from next door : Interview with Ernie Williams.

26. The construction of a new runway and the fuel farm : Interview with
Harry Martin; Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence Agency, 25-26.

27. The A-12 Oxcart was a flying fuel tank : Interview with Harry Martin.

28. CIA’s “own little air force” : Interview with Colonel Slater.

29. Getting the Oxcart to fly : Interview with Frank Murray.

30. 186-mile swath just to make a U-turn : Interview with Colonel Slater.

31. same was true at NORAD : Interviews with Dr. Wheelon, Colonel Slater.

32. they passed a simple sketch : Interview with Ed Lovick.

33. S. Varentsov : CIA Memo, S. Varenstov, Chief Marshal, USSR, The
Problem of Combat with the Nuclear Means of the Enemy and Its Solution,
August 1961.

34. advancing surface-to-air missile technology : Interviews with Dr.
Wheelon, Ed Lovick, T. D. Barnes.

Chapter Eight: Cat and Mouse Becomes Downfall

Interviews: Gary Powers Jr., T. D. Barnes, Dr. Wheelon, Jim Freedman, Gene
Poteat, Helen Kleyla (Richard Bissell’s longtime secretary, via written
correspondence)

1. drenched in sweat : Powers, Operation Overflight, 75.

2. Tvuratam was Russia’s Cape Canaveral : CIA report on U-2 Vulnerability
Tests, April 1960, Eisenhower Archives, Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject
Series, Alphabetical Subseries, Box 15, Intelligence Matters. Memo: ICBM
Targets—The Urals and Tyura Tam, “Sverdlovsk in the Urals is the best bet on
the location of a major ICBM factory.” Notable color U-2 flight maps are in this
file.

3. head up to a facility at Plesetsk : Harford, Korolev, 112. “R-7s and R-7As
were deployed at only two launch pads at Baikonur and, eventually, four at
Plesetsk, a launch center readied by 1959... Plesetsk soon became the busiest of
the USSR’s three launch facilities, having responsibility for placing in orbit
reconnaissance and other military satellites.”

4. two-and-a-half-foot increments : Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 185.

5. indicated he wanted to speak with him : Powers, Operation Overflight, 69.

6. had a premonition : Ibid.

7. awakened by a ringing telephone : W. Taubman, Khrushchev, 443.

8. a sharp poke in the eye : Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 444.
“Sverdlovsk, was an especially deep penetration into our territory and therefore
an especially arrogant violation... They were making these flights to show up
our impotence. Well, we weren’t impotent any longer.”

9. “An uncomfortable situation was shaping up” : Orlov, “The U-2 Program,”

10 .

10. Soviets’ secret bioweapons program : Hoffman, The Dead Hand, 119.

11. Kvshtvm 40 was as valuable : Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 43.

12. “Destroy target” : Orlov, “The U-2 Program,” 11.

13. Stop and think: Powers, Operation Overflight, 83.

14. “He’s turning left” : Jack Anderson, “US Heard Russians Chasing U-2,”
Washington Post, May 12, 1960.

15. NS A operators heard : Bamford, Body of Secrets, 49.

16. “Bill Bailey did not come home” : Richelson, Wizards of Langley, 18.

17. The brand was Laika : Powers, Operation Overflight, 91.

18. “ We believed that if a U-2 was shot ”: Bissell, Reflections of a Cold
Warrior, 121-22. But Bissell also admitted that the Agency agreed
“unanimously” that the “big rolls of film aboard the plane would not be
destroyed... Their nonflammable base would prevent them from burning, and
they could be dropped from a height of ten miles and survive. We always knew
that in the event of a crash there was going to be a couple rolls of film lying
around, and there was not much we could do about it.”

19. the White House claimed : Department of State, for the Press, No. 249,
May 6, 1960; Department of State, for the Press, No. 254, May 9, 1960.

20. But Khrushchev had evidence : Incoming telegram, Department of State,
Control 6700, May 10, 1969.

21. With great bravado : W. Taubman, Khrushchev, 455-58.

22. “I would like to resign” : P. Taubman, Secret Empire, 396.

23. Eisenhower wouldn’t bow : Bamford, Body of Secrets, 53-54. “For
Eisenhower, the whole process was quickly turning into Chinese water torture.
Every day he was being forced to dribble out more and more of the story.”

24. “ the first time any nation had publicly admitted ”: Brugioni, Eyeball to
Eyeball, 49.

25. authorized a Soviet military base : Ibid., 55.

26. twenty-five minutes’ time : Havana, Cuba, to Washington, DC, is 1,130
miles. In 1960, a Russian missile traveled at approximately Mach 3.5.

27. During Powers’s trial : “Report on Conclusion of Powers Trial, USSR
International Affairs,” August 22, 1960, approved for release September 1985,
39 pages.

28. “ Las Vegas firing range (poligon) in the Nevada desert ”: Ibid., RB-6.

29. “criminal conspiracy” : Ibid.

30. “follower of Hitler” : Ibid., RB-20.

31. Watertown as the U-2 training facility : Powers, Operation Overflight,
114.

32. out at the Ranch : Parangosky, The Oxcart Story, 6-7.

33. Richard Bissell had a tennis court put in : Interview with Dr. Wheelon.

34. Prohibited Area P-275 : Interview with Peter Merlin.

35. “ thirteen million different parts ”: Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior,
133.

36. the titanium that first held everything up : Pedlow and Welzenbach,
Central Intelligence Agency, 21-22.

37. nearly 95 percent of what Lockheed initially received : Robarge,
Archangel, 11.

38. Russia was spending billions of rubles : Interview with Ed Lovick.

39. “ who thought ELINT was a dirty word ”: Poteat, “Engineering and the
CIA,” 24.

40. Barnes was recruited by the CIA : Interview with Barnes; CIA Personal
Resume, 1966, Barnes, Thornton Duard.

41. Castro’s regime “must be overthrown ”: Bissell, Reflections of a Cold
Warrior, 153.

42. “Richard Bissell.” Kennedy said : Thomas, “Wayward Spy,” 36.

43. put a bullet in his own head : Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 303.

44. Bahia de Cochinos, or the Bay of Pigs : Kirkpatrick, The Real CIA,

chapter 8; Pfeiffer, CIA’s Official History of the Bay of Pigs; Warner, “CIA’s
Internal Probe.”

45. could help in gathering intel : Oral history interview with Richard M.
Bissell Jr. by Theodore A. Wilson and Richard D. McKinzie, East Hartford,
Connecticut, July 9, 1971.

46. Bissell blamed the mission’s failure on his old rival General Curtis
LeMav : Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, 176. In discussing the decision of
the Joint Chiefs, which included LeMay sitting in for the commandant of the
Marines, “to cancel the air strikes so readily,” Bissell stated, “one could make a
case that their view reflected rivalry between the air force and the CIA. The
agency’s earlier success with the overhead reconnaissance programs had
disturbed certain high-ranking members of the air force.” Certainly he is
referring to LeMay. “Friends of mine in the military spoke frankly to me about
this,” Bissell added. “There was no denying that the sentiment existed among
military that all the air activities undertaken by the CIA in the U-2, SR-71 [note:
Oxcart had not been declassified yet] and spy satellite programs should have
come under jurisdiction of the air force. Robert Amory recalled in a 1966
interview that, after I was put in charge of the U-2 program, 'essentially the air
force’s eye was wiped in you-know-what and they resented that from the
beginning.’” For Bissell, “the resentment never died.”

47. if LeMay had provided adequate air cover : Ibid., 175. “Curtis LeMay
(who was sitting in for the absent commandant of the Marines) and several of the
chiefs admitted their doubt about the absolute essentiality of air cover... I was
shocked. We all knew only too well that without air support, the project would
fail.”

48. “time zone confusion” : Ibid., 189. Bissell wrote, “When the B-26s
lumbered into the air the next day, however, no navy cover appeared. It seemed
that a misunderstanding about the correct time standard had prevented the air
support from being at the target area when expected. As a result, the B-26s were
either forced from the field of battle or shot down, the final tragic blow.” From
the National Security Archive: “The unmarked jets failed to rendezvous with the
bombers, however, because the CIA and the Pentagon were unaware of a time
zone difference between Nicaragua and Cuba.”

49. Lyman B. Kirkpatrick Jr. : Interviews with Jim Freedman.

50. Lyman Kirkpatrick contracted polio : Biography of Lyman B. Kirkpatrick,
Princeton University Library, Department of Rare Books and Special
Collections, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Public Policy Papers. Lyman
B. Kirkpatrick Papers, circa 1933-2000, Call Number MC209.

51. relegated to the role of second-tier bureaucrat : In his memoir, Bissell does
not mince words. He calls Kirkpatrick “an ambitious man who, in spite of
paralysis from polio, aspired to position of director of central intelligence. His
illness necessitated a move from the exciting and challenging directorate of
plans to the more mundane, bureaucratic position of inspector general, a shift he
always resented.” Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, 193.

Chapter Nine: The Base Builds Back Up

Interviews with Harry Martin, Jim Freedman, T. D. Barnes, A1 O’Donnell,
Peter Merlin, Millie Meierdierck

1. the man in charge of property control at Area 51 : Interviews with Jim
Freedman, T. D. Barnes, A1 O’Donnell.

2. “ The high and rugged northeast perimeter ”: Interview with Peter Merlin,
who obtained copies (largely redacted) of Kirkpatrick’s visit to Area 51 from the
CIA’s online reading room (CIA.gov). These documents appear to have since
been removed.

3. “ Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets ”: Absher, Mind-Sets and Missiles,

10 .

4. Area 51 was a target : Interviews with Peter Merlin, Jim Freedman.

5. decided to make a hunting trip : Interview with Jim Freedman; Hank
Meierdierck’s personal papers.

6. Richard Bissell resigned : Oral history interview with Richard M. Bissell Jr.
by Theodore A. Wilson and Richard D. McKinzie, East Hartford, Connecticut,
July 9, 1971 (Harry S. Truman Library and Museum),
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/bissellr.htm .

7. keep the CIA in the spy plane business : Welzenbach, “Science and
Technology,” 23.

8. Richard Bissell alone, had gone rogue : Ibid., 22.

9. CIA might work in better partnership : Richelson, Wizards of Langley, 58-
GO.

10. “ Wayne Pendleton was the head of the radar group ”: Interview with
Wayne Pendleton.

11. “ and ‘dirty tricks’ of Dick Bissell’s ”: Welzenbach, “Science and
Technology,” 22. The full passage reads: “However, a note of discord crept into
Bissell’s relations with Land and Killian... both Land and Killian looked upon
science and technology almost as a religion, something sacred to be kept from

contamination by those who would misuse it for unwholesome ends. Into this
category fit the covert operations and dirty tricks of Dick Bissell’s Directorate of
Plans.”

12. called Teak and Orange : Film footage viewed at the Atomic Testing
Museum, Las Vegas.

13. which is exactly where the ozone layer lies : Hoerlin, “United States High-
Altitude Test,” 43.

14. “ The impetus for these tests ”: Ibid., 47.

15. his rationale : Ground stations were supposed to measure acoustic waves
that would happen as a result of the blast but Teak detonated seven miles
laterally off course to the south and the communication systems were knocked
out. Orange detonated four miles higher than it was supposed to and “the
deviations affected data acquisitions.”

16. The animals’ heads had been locked in gadgets : Oral history interview
with Air Force colonel John Pickering, 52. Film footage viewed at the Atomic
Testing Museum, Las Vegas.

17. “ Teak and Orange events would ‘burn a hole’ into the natural ozone
layer ”: Hoerlin, “United States High-Altitude Test,” 43.

18. Von Braun can be seen examining the Redstone rocket : Teak shot film
footage viewed at the Atomic Testing Museum library, Las Vegas.

19. left the island before the second test : Interview with A1 O’Donnell;
Neufeld, Von Braun, 332.

20. to dash up to Hitler’s lair : Neufeld, Von Braun, 127.

21. project called Operation Argus commenced : Final Review of Argus Fact
Sheet, 16 Apr. 82. “The tests were conducted in complete secrecy and were not
announced until the following year.”

22. Christofilos convinced Killian : Killian, Sputnik, Scientists and
Eisenhower, 187.

23. “probably the most spectacular event ever conducted” : The White House
Memorandum for the President, From J.R. Killian Jr., Subject: Preliminary

Results of the ARGUS experiment, dated November 3, 1958, declassified
5/20/77.

24. Walter Sullivan hand-delivered a letter to Killian : The letter is marked
“By Hand” and dated February 2, 1959, written on New York Times letterhead,
and addressed to Dr. James R. Killian Jr. at the White House.

25. “Neither confirm nor deny such leaks” : Memorandum to Dr. James R.
Killian, Jr. Subject: Release of Information on ARGUS. Dated January 20, 1959,
signed Karl G. Harr, Jr. Special Assistant to the President. Among other things, it
is interesting to note here that on White House stationery, Killian is referred to as
“Dr. Killian.” He was not a doctor; he never received a PhD but rather a
bachelor’s degree in management. This fact was confirmed for me by MIT
library staffer Jennifer Hirsch. “Mr. Killian always went out of his way to remind
people he was not a doctor,” I was told—apparently not so with the White
House.

26. “ I would be protected from congressional inquisition ”: Killian, Sputnik,
Scientists and Eisenhower, 25.

27. “Are you still there?” : Admiral Parker of the Armed Forces Special
Weapons Project; Defense Technical Information Center Staff, Defense’s
Nuclear Agency 1947-1997, 140; Defense Threat Reduction Agency, 2002.

Chapter Ten: Wizards of Science, Technology, and Diplomacy

Interviews: Harry Martin, Louise Schalk, Dr. Wheelon, Colonel Slater, Frank
Murray, Roger Andersen, Ken Collins

1. Martin had been at Area 51 since the very first days : Interviews with Harry
Martin.

2. The generals would inevitably show up : Classified Message, Secret 2135Z
14 May 62, To Director, Prity [sic] OXCART. “1. General Power, General
Compton, Col Montoya and Col Geary [redacted], A-12... During the flight the
visitors were shown [redacted]... Kelly Johnson flew back to Las Vegas with the
group... General Power seemed very impressed with the aircraft.” Declassified
by CIA, August 2007.

3. “Lou, wake up!” : Interview with Louise Schalk.

4. “The aircraft began wobbling” : Johnson, History of the Oxcart Program,

12 .

5. “What in Hell. Lou?” : Rich, Skunk Works, 219.

6. Martin thought for sure the airplane was going to crash : Interview with
Harry Martin.

7. Rare film footage of the historic event : CIA footage, T. D. Barnes’s
personal collection.

8. Bud Wheelon : Central Intelligence Agency, “Biographic Profile, Albert
Dewell Wheelon,” May 10, 1966, NARA, MRB, RG 263.

9. Howard and Jane Roman : Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder, 275. “When
the CIA Counterintelligence Staff was established, Jim Angleton assumed
responsibility for operational liaison with the FBI. Jane Roman, a veteran OSS
X-2 officer, handled the daily meetings...”; interview with Dr. Wheelon.

10. hand-picked by President Kennedy’s science advisers : Central
Intelligence Agency, R. V. Jones Intelligence Award Ceremony Honoring Dr.
Albert Wheelon, December 13, 1994.

11. “in this wav. I became the new ‘Mayor of Area 51’” : Interview with Dr.

Wheelon.

12. Agency had been analyzing reports : McAuliffe, CIA Documents on the
Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, 1-31.

13. including 1.700 Soviet military technicians : Ibid., 37.

14. jamming facilities against Cape Canaveral : Ibid.

15. McCone left for his honeymoon in Paris : Interview with Dr. Wheelon.

16. Not another Gary Powers incident : This was a common theme among
military planners all through the 1960s.

17. the CIA got presidential approval : Office of Special Activities DD/S&T
Chronological History, 30 August 1966, Top Secret, Approved for release Jul
2001, 5. “5 October 1962, Last CIA Flight over Cuba (50 flown in all).”

18. pushing for preemptive strikes : Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 265.

19. Ledford had been asked by McCone : Interview with Dr. Wheelon.

20. General LeMav encouraged him to take the CIA liaison job : Richelson,
Wizards of Langley, 53.

21. Ledford’s plane crash, involving heroics : Official Website of U.S. Air
Force, biography of Brigadier General Jack C. Ledford, retired Oct. 1, 1970;
died Nov. 16, 2007.

22. tried to treat Ledford with opiates : This story was legendary among the
men who worked under Ledford at Area 51 and is sourced from multiple
interviews including with Colonel Slater and Frank Murray. A version of it can
be read at the Arlington National Cemetery Web site. Ledford’s backseater,
Sergeant Harry C. Miller, died of his original wounds several hours after Ledford
and the medic helped him out of the plane.

23. The chances were one in six. Ledford said : Richelson, Wizards of
Langley, 53.

24. Kennedy felt that if a CIA spy plane : Interview with Dr. Wheelon.

25. Air Force pilot flying an Agency U-2 : Richelson, Wizards of Langley, 54.

26. Photographs showing nuclear missiles : Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball,
photographic inserts.

Chapter Eleven: What Airplane?

Interviews: Ken Collins, Don Donohue, Sam Pizzo, Frank Murray, Roger
Andersen, Florence DeLuna, Frank Micalizzi, Harry Martin

1. Collins went by the code name Ken Colmar : Interviews with Ken Collins,
who had never revealed his code name before.

2. She made it as far as Athens : Powers, Overflight, 59.

3. he flew deep into North Korea : Citation, First Lieutenant Kenneth S.
Collins, SO. No. 221 Hq FEAP, AP0925, 6 May 53, by Command of General
Weyland.

4. fired at by MiG fighter jets : Ibid.

5. Distinguished Flying Cross : Citation to Accompany the Award of the
Distinguished Flying Cross (First Oak Leaf Cluster) to Kenneth S. Collins. AO
2222924, United States Air Force.

6. coveted Silver Star for valor : Citation for Silver Star, First Lieutenant
Kenneth S. Collins, by direction of the president.

7. a total of five Oxcarts being flight-tested at Area 51 : Robarge, Archangel,
17.

8. Captain Donald Donohue would start out following Collins : Interview with
Don Donohue.

9. Later. Jack Weeks : Interview with Ken Collins.

10. “ Suddenly, the altimeter was rapidly unwinding ”: Interview with Ken
Collins.

11. Sam Pizzo had a monumental amount of work : Interview with Sam Pizzo.

12. took to the desert terrain on horseback : Interview with Ken Collins.

13. filled by Air Force brass : Interview with Colonel Slater.

14. Holburv had been given a commendation by General Patton : General
Robert J. Holbury biography, Air Commander, Detachment 1 of the 1129th U.S.

Air Force Special Activities Squadron at Groom Lake, Nevada; Roadrunners
Internationale official Web site.

15. a pitot tube had in fact caused the crash : Interview with Collins;
Parangosky, The Oxcart Story, 11.

16. monitoring phone conversations : Briefing Note for the Deputy Director
of Central Intelligence, 10 March 1964. Attachment 1 to BYE-2015-64, “Project
Oxcart Awareness Outside Cleared Community.” The Agency also had a system
in place to monitor air traffic chatter during Oxcart test flights to see if any
commercial or military pilots spotted the plane.

17. increasingly suspicious CIA : Col. Redmond White, Diary Notes,
September 27, 1963, Secret. White was the CIA’s deputy director/support and his
notes include a second reference to the disclosure to Aviation Week as well as a
notation that CIA director John McCone said, “OXCART is going to blow
sooner or later.”

18. the Air Force ordered not one but three variants : Pedlow and Welzenbach,
Central Intelligence Agency, 33.

19. letters stood for “Reconnaissance/Strike” : Memorandum, Secretary of the
Air Force Eugene Zuckert to General Bernard Schriever, April 8, 1963, w/att:
Procurement and Security Provisions for the R-12 Program, Top Secret.

20. eight hundred million dollars developing the B-70 bomber airplane :
Marcelle Size Knaack, Encyclopedia of U.S. Air Force Aircraft and Missile
Systems, Post-World War II Bombers, 559. The XB-70Ahad its genesis in
Boeing Aircraft Corporation’s Project MX-2145. Also see Bah, Politics and
Force Levels, 216-18.

21. the President was astonished : Rich, Skunk Works, 228.

22. “unnecessary and economically unjustifiable” : President Kennedy,

Special Message to the Congress of Urgent National Needs, delivered in person
before a joint session of Congress, May 25, 1961.

23. Congress cut back its B-70 order even further : House Armed Services
Committee, Authorizing Appropriations for Aircraft, Missiles and Naval Vessels
for the Armed Forces (1961), 569, see FY 1962, 1564-65, 1577.

24. “ Johnson. I want a promise out of you ”: Rich, Skunk Works, 231.

25. LeMav promised to send Lockheed : Robarge, Archangel, 52. The Air
Force initially envisioned a fleet of as many as a hundred YF-12s, designed to
intercept a Soviet supersonic bomber rumored to be in the works.

26. At the Ranch, it was business as usual : Interview with Colonel Slater.

27. finally delivered to the Ranch : Robarge, Archangel, 17. The J-57 engine
could reach a maximum speed of Mach 1.6 and a maximum height of 40,000
feet; interview with John Evans of Pratt and Whitney.

28. An X-ray showed the outline of a pen : Interview with Ed Lovick.

29. new set of challenges : Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence
Agency, 38.

30. F-101 chase plane had run off the airstrip : Interview with Don Donohue.

31. Lyndon Johnson would be briefed : CIA Memo, Meeting with the
President, Secretary Rusk, Secretary McNamara, Mr. Bundy and DCI. Re:
Surfacing the OXCART, 29 November, 1963, 1.

Chapter Twelve: Covering Up the Cover-Up

Interviews: Jim Freedman, Colonel Slater, T. D. Barnes, Stanton Friedman

1. “ I heard it was in Area 22 ”: Interview with Jim Freedman. In
contemporary maps of the test site, Area 22 is located down by Camp Mercury.
In the 1950s and 1960s, many of the quadrants were numbered differently.

2. 354.200 feet—almost 67 miles up : Jenkins, Hypersonics Before the
Shuttle, 119. The Karman line, commonly used to define the boundary between
the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, is at an altitude of approximately
328,000, or 62 miles above sea level. The U-2 flew at 70,000 feet, or
approximately 13 miles; the A-12 flew at 90,000 feet, or approximately 17.5
miles.

3. “ on 30 April. A-12 was in air ”: Priority Secret Classified Message to

Director from-2219Z Classified Message Secret 15 May 62, ZE19C

“Oxcart Secure Ops.”

4. commercial pilots would report sightings : Interview with Colonel Slater;
Annie Jacobsen, “The Road to Area 51,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, April 5,
2009, 26-28, 77.

5. Walter Cronkite hosted a CBS news special report : The report can be
viewed online, “From the Vault,” CBS Reports.

6. Dr. Robertson appeared on a CBS Reports: Haines, “CIA’s Role,” 74.

7. House Armed Services Committee held hearings on UFOs : “Congress
Reassured on Space Visits,” New York Times, April 6, 1966.

8. Air Force laying blame for the cover-up on the CIA : Walter L. Mackey,
executive officer, memorandum for DCI, “Air Force Request to Declassify CIA
Material on Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO),” September 1, 1966.

9. According to CIA historian Gerald Haines : Haines, “CIA’s Role.”

10. journalist named John Lear : Lear, “The Disputed CIA Document on
UFO’s,” Saturday Review, September 3, 1966.

11. One of the more enigmatic figures : Hillenkoetter took over amid

negotiations on May 1, 1947, of what would be the National Security Act of
1947, so when the CIA came into being on September 18, 1947, he was already
DCI, per the Central Intelligence Agency Library, Roscoe Henry Hillenkoetter,
Rear Admiral, US Navy, CIA.gov.

12. served on the board of governors : Haines, “CIA’s Role,” 74.

13. Hillenkoetter testified to Congress : “Air Force Order on ‘Saucers’ Cited;
Pamphlet by the Inspector General Called Objects a ‘Serious Business,”’ New
York Times, February 28, 1960.

14. he mysteriously resigned : NICAP Web site, “The Who Was Series,”
Hillenkoetter, Vice-Admiral Roscoe, http://www.nicap.org/photobio.htm : in my
interview with Stan Friedman, Friedman said there was nothing mysterious
about Hillenkoetter’s resigning, “he just resigned.” Nor does Friedman believe
that Hillenkoetter was planted at NICAP to gather information.

15. Bryan’s true role with the ufologists : Ibid. In the official NICAP bio for
Hillenkoetter, it is written, “He resigned from NICAP in Feb 1962 and was
replaced on the NICAP Board by a former covert CIA high official, Joseph
Bryan III, the CIA’s first Chief of Political & Psychological Warfare (Bryan
never disclosed his CIA background to NICAP or Keyhoe).”

16. the CIA had maintained three lines of thought on UFOs : Memorandum
for file OSI, Meeting of OSI Advisory Group on UFO, January 14 through 17,
1953, 3 pages; Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, 14-17
January 1953, Evidence Presented, 2 pages; CIA Scientific Advisory Panel on
Unidentified Flying Objects, Comments and Suggestions of UFO Panel, 19
pages. The CIA party line on UFOs had been firmly established by General
Bedell Smith during his tenure and was maintained until sometime around 1966,
when this new thinking emerged.

17. This new postulation came from the Agency’s monitoring : CIA Memo,
Translation, Vitolniyek, R. (Director) Flying phenomena, Sovetsknya Latviya,
no. 287, 10 Dec. 67; CIA Memo, 10 Aug. 67, “Report on Conversations with
Soviet Scientists on Subject of Unidentified Flying Objects in the USSR”; CIA
Memo, Translation of Memo from KonsomoTskaya pravda, no. 13, 20 January
68, author Zigel, 3.

18. Villen Lvustiberg : CIA Memo, Translation, Lyustiberg V. (Science

commentator for [illegible]), “Are Flying Saucers a Myth?” Pravda, Ukrainy,
no. 40, 17 Feb. 68.

19. “the U.S, publicizes them to divert people from its failures and
aggressions” : CIA Memo, Translation, “Nothing But the Facts on UFOs or
Which Novosti Writer Do You Read?” 9 April 1968, 12 pages.

20. Zigel. had come to believe : The CIA followed Zigel closely. In the
Agency’s author biography on him, it states: “Zigel, F. Yu., Dr of Technical
Science, writes under auspices of Moscow Aviation Institute, Associate
Professor there as of 1969.” CIA analysts discovered that Zigel’s interest in
UFOs began with his interest in astronomy and mathematics in 1936, after he
participated in an expedition to Kazakhstan to observe a solar eclipse. Zigel had
also visited the Tunguska crater in Siberia, where a comet likely exploded, in
1908. The blast knocked over approximately 80 million trees and flattened 830
square miles of Siberian forest. In the early 1960s Zigel stunned his colleagues
by suggesting that the Tunguska crater could have been created by an outer
space vehicle that crashed there.

21. “UFO Section of the All-Union Cosmonautics Committee” : Title:
Unidentified flying objects, Source: Soviet Life, no. 2 1968, 27-29, 1.

22. “ The hypothesis that UFOs originate in other worlds ”: Ibid.

Chapter Thirteen: Dull, Dirty, and Dangerous Requires Drones

Interviews: Ken Collins, Charlie Trapp, Colonel Slater, General Hsichun
“Mike” Hua, Edward Lovick, Changti “Robin” Yeh (via written
correspondence), Hervey Stockman

1. Collins knew the kind : Interview with Ken Collins.

2. simulated jungle survival : Interviews with Ken Collins, Charlie Trapp.

3. CIA pilot named Yeh Changti : Hua, Lost Black Cats, ix.

4. the Black Cats flew : Ibid., viii-x.

5. “ no information was released about Yeh Changti ”: Interview with General
Hua.

6. “ His code name was Terry Lee ”: Interview with Colonel Slater. Yeh
Changti’s American name is Robin Yeh (the Chinese put family names first).

7. getting hard intelligence on China’s nuclear facilities : National
Photographic Interpretation Center, Mission [GRC-169], 23 August 1963, 30
pages. The designation for these missions was Operation Church Door. Images
of targets photographed by the Black Cats include the Lop Nur nuclear facility,
missile launch sites, airfields, ports, and industrial complexes.

8. Yeh Changti was tortured and held prisoner : Interview with General Hua;
in Lost Black Cats, Hua, a former CIA Black Cat U-2 pilot, tells the tragic and
amazing story of the nineteen years Changti and Chang spent as captives of
Communist China, based on personal interviews. The sacrifices made by
Changti and Chang have never been acknowledged by the CIA. On September
17, 1998, the CIA held a symposium called “U-2: A Revolution in Intelligence”
to honor the declassification of many CIA-controlled U-2 operations and to
celebrate its success. But the symposium omitted any mention of the Black Cat
U-2 pilots according to my interview with General Hua.

9. second Black Cat pilot named Major Jack Chang : Ibid., ix. To clarify,
General Hua also refers to Major Jack Chang as Chang Liyi—Jack being the
pilot’s American nickname and Liyi being his “first name” in Chinese, which is
his family name, the reverse of Western usage.

10. dull, dirty, and dangerous : Interview with T. D. Barnes.

11. “ and then head back out to sea ”: Interview with Lovick. “A colleague
named Mike Ash and I designed an electrical circuit into the drone’s pallet to
select an antenna to be used to radiate the recovery beacon signal. If the sensor
package was not recovered by an aircraft and it fell into the water, an antenna
was deployed to allow radio signals to enable recovery.” If the sensor package
landed upside down, Lovick and Ash had created a system which allowed the
seawater to act like a switch and activate a second antenna.

12. Yuletide : Interviews with Colonel Slater, Frank Murray.

13. “ with PJs nearly falling off cliffs ”: Interview with Charlie Trapp.

14. flight engineer. Ray Torick : There are many different ideas about why
and how Torick died. I adhere to Colonel Slater’s view of the events. The
drone’s first official test launch was on March 5, 1966, and during that flight, the
drone launched successfully off the back of the mother ship while traveling at a
speed of Mach 3.2. It then flew approximately 120 miles before it ran out of fuel
and crashed into the sea, as was planned. A month later, a second launch sent a
drone flying for 1,900 miles, at Mach 3.3, until it fell into the sea. It was on the
third test launch that disaster struck and Torick died.

15. “ He impulsively and emotionally decided ”: Rich, Skunk Works, 267.

16. “ never again allow a Francis Gary Powers situation ”: Ibid.

17. “Ben, do you recognize this?” Ibid., 270.

18. dubbed Operation Aphrodite : Singer, Wired for War, 48.

19. Tesla’s pilotless boat : Tesla, “Inside the Lab-Remote Control,” PBS,
http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/lab remotec.html .

20. Goliath carried 132 pounds of explosives : “Rise of the Machines,”
ArmyTechnology.com, May 21, 2008, http://www.army-
technology.com/features/featurel951/ .

21. mother ship called Marmalade : AFSC History Staff, History of Air Force
Atomic Cloud Sampling, 9.

22. Fox, was blasted “sixty feet higher : Ibid., 11.

23. Operation Sandstone : For the Air Force, maintaining a drone wing was
expensive. It was also a security risk. In early 1947, that more atomic tests were
being planned was a closely guarded national secret because the public was
being led to believe that the United States was genuinely considering outlawing
the bomb—or at least putting the United Nations in control of atomic energy. In
reality, it was during this period of alleged international debate that the drone
unit was again called back into action for the next test series in the Pacific.
Operation Crossroads was supposed to have been a singular event, and so talk
surfaced among the drone pilots. Being reactivated could only mean one thing:
more nuclear tests in the pipeline. This security leak made its way up the chain
of command.

24. accidentally flew through the Zebra bomb’s mushroom cloud : AFSC
History Staff, History of Air Force Atomic Cloud Sampling, 21.

25. “Now pilots, not drones, would be sent”: Ibid., 23-24.

26. fear that the entire world’s atmosphere could catch on fire : Interviews
with A1 O’Donnell and Jim Freedman.

27. what happened to Oppenheimer sent a strong message : Interview with A1
O’Donnell.

28. measurements inside the thermonuclear clouds : Now called Task Group
3.4 and operating out of Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, these new drones were
modified T-33 aircraft, as opposed to the old TF-80s used in earlier tests. The
wing fell under the command of Colonel Thomas Gent, who was also in
command of the 550th Guided Missile Wing of the Air Proving Ground.

29. crash-landed on a deserted island called Bogallua : AFSC History Staff,
History of Air Force Atomic Cloud Sampling, 37.

30. That group included Hervev Stockman : Ibid., 82. Hervey’s name is
misspelled as “Harvey.”

31. Stockman, then flew sampling missions : Ibid., 80-85. Interview with
Hervey Stockman.

32. “ scientists put monkeys in the cockpits ”: “Conversations with Colonel
Hervey S. Stockman,” edited by Ann Paden and Earl Haney (not published),
from a section called “Nuclear testing program.”

33. “ not serving as guinea pigs ”: AFSC History Staff, History of Air Force
Atomic Cloud Sampling, 66.

34. “ In those days ”: “Conversations with Colonel Hervey S. Stockman,”
edited by Ann Paden and Earl Haney (not published), from a section called
“Pacific testing ground.”

35. Jimmy P, Robinson was one of the six pilots : The details of Robinson’s
story, including where I quote him, can be found in AFSC History Staff, History
of Air Force Atomic Cloud Sampling, 69-75. Robinson’s name is redacted from
the monograph, the words “privacy act material removed” stamped in their
place. In 2009, Mark Wolverton wrote “Into the Mushroom Cloud” for Azr and
Space magazine and revealed the pilot’s name publicly for the first time.
Robinson was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross about a
year after his death, but his family had no idea how he actually had died.
Wolverton wrote that Robinson’s daughter Rebecca, “a baby when her father
died, spent years petitioning the government for more information about his last
mission, with only limited access.” Rebecca Robinson says most of the
information about her father’s death is “still classified.”

36. Atomic-sampling pilots wore lead-lined vests : AFSC History Staff,
History of Air Force Atomic Cloud Sampling, 101.

37. “It was one of the ones that was too big” : Interview with A1 O’Donnell.

38. In contrast, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima : Rhodes, Dark Sun,
photograph #76, “Mike over Manhattan.” Here, the Ivy Mike fireball is shown in
comparison with a Nagasaki-scale atomic bomb. Mike’s stem was 20 miles in
diameter and its mushroom cap only began at 50,000 feet, approximately twice
as high as commercial airplanes fly. The top of the mushroom cloud extended
into the troposphere and was approximately 200 miles wide.

Chapter Fourteen: Drama in the Desert

Interviews: Colonel Slater, Dr. Wheelon, Ken Collins, Kenneth Swanson,
Frank Murray, Charlie Trapp, Frank Murray, Tony Bevacqua, Dr. Robert B.
Abernethy

1. air-conditioned hunting blind : Woods, LBJ, 313.

2. “ I’ll be dammed ”: Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising, 175.

3. “ Soon they will be dropping ”: Dickson, Sputnik, 117.

4. not a cause for panic : Korda, Ike, 700.

5. “ What most actually saw ”: Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising, 176.

6. Johnson sat in the Oval Office with CIA director : CIA Memo, Meeting
with the President, Secretary Rusk, Secretary McNamara, Mr. Bundy and DCI.
Re: Surfacing the OXCART, 29 November, 1963, 1.

7. it would hold aviation records : T. D. Barnes explained, “Officially, the SR-
71 Blackbird still holds the world speed record for sustained flight in an oxygen¬
breathing plane in horizontal flight but it is common knowledge throughout the
Blackbird community that the A-12 flew higher and faster because of the
sacrifices the SR-71 made to accommodate a second passenger. The reason the
SR-71 holds the ‘records’ is because those of the A-12 were not certified. The A-
12 Oxcart didn’t exist when the Air Force was setting records.”

8. outing the Oxcart was a terrific idea : If the public knew about Oxcart, there
would no longer be a reason to have the Agency in charge of a program that
needed secrecy as a cover. The Air Force knew the CIA had done all the work
getting Oxcart up and running; now was the time to push the Agency aside. This
echoes what happened with Curtis LeMay’s early summation of the U-2 program
in 1955: “We’ll let [the CIA] develop it and then we’ll take it from them,” from
Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 24.

9. they could take over Oxcart : Letter, General Bernard Schriever to Eugene
M. Zuckert, July 11, 1963, Top Secret.

10. McCone tried a different approach : CIA Memo, Meeting with the

President, Re: Surfacing the OXCART, 29 November, 1963, 1. “The
development of the CIA and Air Force reconnaissance planes (15 in number)
would cost about $700 million, of which about $400 million have now been
spent.” This figure does not include the aircraft’s “extraordinary engines,” made
by Pratt and Whitney. Regarding those costs, Lockheed Skunk Works chief
(from 1975-1991) Ben Rich wrote, “The CIA unhappily swallowed the
enormous development costs of $600 million.”

11. the fictitious name A-ll : Parangosky, The Oxcart Story, 4: “The
President’s reference to the ‘A-ll’ was of course deliberate. ‘A-ll’ had been the
original design designation for the all-metal aircraft first proposed by Lockheed;
subsequently it became the design designation for the Air Force YF-12A
interceptor which differed from its parent mainly in that it carried a second man
for launching air-to-air missiles. To preserve the distinction between the A-ll
and the A-12 Security had briefed practically all participating personnel in
government and industry on the impending announcement. OXCART secrecy
continued in effect. There was considerable speculation about an Agency role in
the A-ll development, but it was never acknowledged by the government.”

12. “ The world record for aircraft speed ”: Public Papers of Presidents of the
United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-1964, 1:322-23.

13. the aircraft were still dripping wet : Interview with Colonel Slater.

14. “ without the specific knowledge of the President ”: Summary of Meeting
with Secretary McNamara and Secretary Gilpatric, General Carter and Mr.
McCone on 5 July 1962. DCI Records dated 6 July 1962.

15. approved the Oxcart for Operation Skylark : Carter Memorandum to
Wheelon, “SKYLARK,” 22 Aug. 1964.

16. according to Ken Collins : Interview with Ken Collins.

17. specially designed J-58 turbojet engines : Interview with Dr. Robert
Abernethy. Robarge, Archangel, 12-13.

18. two men working there were crushed to death : Rich, Skunk Works, 221.

19. tiny black dots began to appear : Ibid., 223, from a story told by Norm
Nelson, the CIA-Lockheed Skunk Works liaison during Oxcart.

20. nearly knocking him unconscious : Interview with Ken Collins.

21. he always sat patiently with the project pilots : Ibid.

22. “Fix it.” Park said : Rich, Skunk Works, 221. This story was also clarified
for me by Ken Collins, who provided additional details.

23. “ ‘Get me out of here!”’ Rich later recalled : Rich, Skunk Works, 227.

24. Project Kempster-Lacroix : Interview with Ed Lovick; Pedlow and
Welzenbach, Central Intelligence Agency, 42.

25. the government had exploded 286 nuclear bombs : Through Operation
Hardtack there were 119 aboveground tests. Testing resumed on September 15,
1961. From then through the end of 1964, there were 167 underground tests at
NTS, including 4 at Nellis Air Force Range.

26. “ The first jamming system was called Red Dog ”: Interview with Kenneth
Swanson.

27. Trapp thought it sounded interesting : Interview with Charlie Trapp.

28. General Ledford, the head of the Office of Special Activities : My portrait
of General Ledford is based on my interviews with men who knew him well,
including Dr. Wheelon, Colonel Slater, and Frank Murray, in addition to his U.S.
Air Force biographical information.

29. it was not in Frank Murray’s character : Interview with Colonel Slater.

30. In 2005 NSA admitted : Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 276-80.

31. Robert McNamara performing an about-face regarding Oxcart : Robarge,
Archangel, 31.

32. supplying surface-to-air missile systems : Helms Memorandum to the 303
Committee, OXCART Reconnaissance of North Vietnam, with Attachment, 15
May 1967.

33. set up around Hanoi : Interview with Tony Bevacqua; photographs from
Bevacqua’s personal collection.

Chapter Fifteen: The Ultimate Boys’ Club

Interviews: Ken Collins, Colonel Slater, Frank Murray, Fred White, Charlie
Trapp, William “Bill” Weaver, Brigadier General Raymond L. Haupt

1. shaken from their beds : Interview with Ken Collins. A moratorium on
testing meant that the Titania bomb, exploded on October 30, 1958, was the last
nuclear bomb fired at the Nevada Test Site for a period of nearly three years. In
August of 1961, the Russians announced they were resuming testing and
conducted thirty-one nuclear tests over the next three months, including the fifty-
eight-megaton Tsar Bomba, the largest bomb ever exploded. In response,
Kennedy had the AEC resume testing at the Nevada Test Site; interview with A1
O’Donnell.

2. The incident has never been declassified : Interview with Collins.

3. the less you knew, the better : A sentiment unanimously shared by all CIA
and USAF pilots interviewed.

4. No radio, almost no TV : Interviews with Slater, Murray, Collins.

5. “like an incubus” : Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder, 309.

6. “The only sin in espionage is getting caught” : David Robarge, “Richard
Helms.”

7. Helms would be recruited by the Office of Strategic Services : Helms, A
Look Over My Shoulder, 31.

8. a seafood run to Westover Air Force Base : Interview with Colonel Slater.

9. MKULTRA files destroyed : The authority on this subject is John Marks, a
former State Department analyst and staff assistant to the intelligence director. In
June of 1977, Marks obtained access to part of seven boxes of MKULTRA, the
only ones allegedly not lost and consisting mostly of financial records. In his
book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Marks wrote that shortly before
leaving the CIA, “Helms presided over a wholesale destruction of documents
and tapes—presumably to minimize information that might later be used against
him,” 219.

10. front page of the New York Times: According to Colonel Slater.

11. Slater and General Ledford would be asked : No. 303 National Security
Action Memorandum, June 2, 1964; Top Secret, From the Director of Central
Intelligence, Memorandum for the 303 Committee, 22 March 1966.

12. “ McNamara was delaying finding a mission ”: Interview with Dr.
Wheelon.

13. if a CIA spy plane were to get shot down : CIA Memorandum, “Reactions
to a possible US Course of Action,” 17 March 1966; “OXCART Development
Summary and Progress,” 1 October 1966-31 December 1966.

14. The majority voted against deployment : Robarge, Archangel, 33.

15. Slater now wanted it reduced by nearly 30 percent : Interview with
Colonel Slater.

16. Park had flown over all four corners of America : John Parangosky,
deputy for technology, OSA, wrote in summation of Park’s flight: “An
impressive demonstration of the OXCART capability occurred on 21 December
1966 when Lockheed test pilot Bill Park flew 10,198 statute miles in six hours.
The aircraft left the test area in Nevada and flew northward over Yellowstone
National Park, thence eastward to Bismarck, North Dakota, and on to Duluth,
Minnesota. It then turned south and passed Atlanta en route to Tampa, Florida,
then northwest to Portland, Oregon, then southwest to Nevada. Again the flight
turned eastward, passing Denver and St. Louis. Turning around at Knoxville,
Tennessee, it passed Memphis in the home stretch back to Nevada. This flight
established a record unapproachable by any other aircraft; it began at about the
same time a typical government employee starts his work day and ended two
hours before his quitting time.” Full text at Roadrunners Internationale official
Web site.

17. Walt Ray was, by all accounts, a terrific pilot : Interviews with Colonel
Slater, Walt Murray, Ken Collins, Roger Andersen, Charlie Trapp.

18. “ flew down to Cabo San Lucas ”: Interview with Ken Collins.

19. fuel gauge move suddenly : Briefing Memorandum for Acting Deputy
Director for Science and Technology, Subject Loss of Oxcart A-12 Aircraft, 6
January 1967.

20. Walt Ray told Colonel Slater through his headset : Interview with Colonel
Slater.

21. Tm ejecting” : Interview with Colonel Slater. Immediately after the crash
Air Force channels reported that an SR-71 flying on a routine flight out of
Edwards Air Force Base had gone missing and was presumed down in Nevada.

22. unable to separate from his seat : Memorandum for Acting Deputy
Director for Science and Technology, Subject Loss of Article 125 (Oxcart
Aircraft), 25 January 1967, 2.

23. Roger Andersen flew in low, in a T-33 : Interview with Roger Andersen.

24. Charlie Trapp found the aircraft first : Interview with Charlie Trapp.

25. “ ‘How’d you like to fly the plane?’ ”: Interview with Frank Murray.

26. eight-page letter to the president : Top Secret Idealist/Oxcart, Central
Intelligence Agency Office of the Director, BYE-2915-66 Alternative A, 14
December 1966.

27. a scandalous waste of an asset : DRAFT, Director of Special Activities,
Comments to W.R. Thomas III Memorandum to the Director, BOB, 27 July
1966, 11.

28. Gary Powers incident had actually strengthened : Ibid., 3.

29. the CIA “controls no nuclear weapons ”: Top Secret Idealist/Oxcart,
Central Intelligence Agency Office of the Director, BYE-2915-66 Alternative A,
14 December 1966, 4.

30. But would the president see things his way : Memorandum for the
President, Subject: Advanced Reconnaissance Aircraft, December 26, 1966, Top
Secret. Participants included Cyrus Vance (deputy secretary of defense), Donald
Hornig (the president’s science adviser), C.W. Fischer (bureau of the budget),
and Helms. All except Helms recommended mothballing Oxcart. On December
28, the president approved this memo recommendation and ordered the phaseout
of the A-12 fleet by January 1968.

31. Slater was instructed to return to Area 51: Interview with Colonel Slater.

32. ahead of a two-star general : Ibid.

33. Slater went to visit Werner Weiss: Ibid.

Chapter Sixteen: Operation Black Shield and the Secret History of the USS
Pueblo

Interviews: Colonel Slater, Ken Collins, Roger Andersen, Hervey Stockman,
Peter Stockman, Frank Murray, Ronald L. “Jack” Layton, Eunice Layton,

Charlie Trapp

1. “never found have much use for intelligence” : Hathaway and Smith,
Richard Helms, 2. The most telling comment comes from Helms (ibid., 7):

“With President Johnson... I finally came to the conclusion that what I had to
say I should get into the first 60, or at least 120 seconds, that I had on my feet.
Because after that he was pushing buttons for coffee or Fresca, or talking to
Rusk, or talking to McNamara, or whispering here or whispering there. I had lost
my principal audience.”

2. Target Tuesday lunch : Barrett, “Doing Tuesday Lunch,’” 676-77.

3. Helms told the president : John Parangosky, Deputy for Technology, OS A,
wrote in summation, “Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, submitted
to the 303 Committee another formal proposal to deploy the OXCART. In
addition, he raised the matter at President Johnson’s Tuesday Lunch’ on 16
May, and received the Presidents approval to ‘go.’ Walt Rostow later in the day
formally conveyed the President’s decision, and the BLACK SHIELD
deployment plan was forthwith put into effect.”

4. A million pounds of materiel. 260 support crew : Johnson, History of the
Oxcart Program, 1. The three A-12s that were deployed to Kadena flew nonstop
from Groom Lake across the Pacific. They refueled twice en route and got to
Kadena in a little less than six hours; interview with Colonel Slater, Ken Collins,
Frank Murray, Roger Andersen.

5. “the bird should leave the nest” : CIA Director of Special Activities to CIA
Director of Reconnaissance, “Operation readiness of the OXCART System,” 12
November 1965.

6. nearly 40 percent of all islanders’ income : CIA NLE MR Case No. 2000-
69, Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa) June 1960, 2. “The military economy employs
13% of the working population and generates 36% of the national income.”

7. to keep an extremely low profile : Interview with Ken Collins.

8. “no plausible cover story” : Interview with Colonel Slater.

9. the first Oxcart mission : Photographic Interpretation Report: Black Shield
Mission X-001, 31 May 1967. NPIC/R-112/67, June 1967.

10. by the time the photographic intelligence got back : John Parangosky,
Deputy for Technology, OSA, wrote: “Film from earlier missions was developed
at the Eastman Kodak plant in Rochester, New York. By late summer an Air
Force Center in Japan carried out the processing in order to place the
photointelligence in the hands of American commanders in Vietnam within 24
hours of completion of a BLACK SHIELD mission.”

11. four were “detected and tracked” : CHESS RUFF TRINE OXCART,
BYE-44232/67, Black Shield Reconnaissance Missions 31 May-15 August

1967, 22 Sept. 1967, Central Intelligence Agency, 1. Declassified in August
2007.

12. first attempted shoot-down : Robarge, Archangel, 36.

13. when he was involved in a midair crash : interview with Hervey
Stockman; also from Conversations with Hervey Stockman (not numbered) in a
section called “Mid-air collision.”

14. to find U.S, airmen who’d gone down : Interview with Frank Murray.

15. “I hope they try something because we are looking for a fight” : Karnow,
Vietnam, 514.

16. it was on an espionage mission : CIA Top Secret [Redacted], 24 January

1968, Memorandum: Chronology of Events Concerning the Seizure of the USS
Pueblo, 8 pages.

17. two MiG-21 fighter jets appeared on the scene : Ibid., 3.

18. The captain considered sinking his ship : Bamford, Body of Secrets, 259.

19. 90 percent of the documents survived : Ibid., 305.

20. Pentagon began secretly preparing for war : Department of Defense, Top
Secret Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, January 25, 1968.

21. pinpointed the Pueblo’s exact location : TOP SECRET TRINE OXCART,
BYE-1330/68 Figure 9; a map of Weeks’s flight is noted as Mission BX-6847,
26 January 1968, figure 5.

22. he told his fellow pilots about the problems : Interviews with Frank
Murray, Ken Collins.

23. very few individuals had any idea : In fact, for forty years, Frank Murray
believed he had located the USS Pueblo because, in a bizarre twist, the CIA told
him he did. Only in 2007, when the CIA declassified the official documents on
the Oxcart program, was Jack Weeks’s true role in the crisis finally revealed.
Murray’s other mission remains classified.

24. “ So we had to abandon any plans to hit them with airpower ”: Rich, Skunk
Works, 44. This is in a section of Rich’s book written by Walt W. Rostow,
President Johnson’s national security adviser from 1966 to 1968.

25. Murray was assigned to fly Oxcart’s second mission over North Korea :
TOP SECRET TRINE OXCART, BYE-1330/68 figure 7. Mission BX-6853, 19
February 1968.

26. a U.S. federal judge determined : Wilber, “Hell Hath a Jury.”

27. There were beautiful sunsets to watch : Interview with Ken Collins.

28. collectively flown twenty-nine missions : Robarge, Archangel, 35. The
pilots were put on alert to fly a total of fifty-eight. Of the twenty-nine, twenty-
four were over North Vietnam, two were over Cambodia, Laos, and the DMZ,
and three were over North Korea.

29. “ using our jamming systems on the bird ”: Interview with Frank Murray.
The Pentagon was also using Oxcart photographs to identify potential targets for
U.S. Air Force air strikes. TOP SECRET CHESS RUFF TRINE Oxcart BYE-
44232/67.

30. The Blackbirds were arriving on Kadena to take Oxcart’s place :
Interviews with Ken Collins and Tony Bevacqua. The SR-71 began arriving in
March of 1968.

31. “ reaffirmed the original decision to end the A-12 program ”: Helms
Memorandum to Paul Nitze (DOD) and Horning, “Considerations Affecting

OXCART Program Phase Out,” 18 April 1968.

32. Jack Weeks became ill : Interview with Ken Collins.

33. After Bevacqua had left Groom Lake : Interview with Tony Bevacqua.

34. mission on July 26. 1968 : This was the first time an SR-71 was fired
upon by an SA-2. With Bevacqua, in the backseat, was reconnaissance systems
officer Jerry Crew, www.blackbirds,net/sr71/sr-crew-photos/ (accessed
December 29, 2010).

35. The 1129th Special Activities Squadron had reached its end : The Oxcart
program lasted just over ten years, from its inception as a drawing on a piece of
paper called A-l, in 1957, to termination in June of 1968. Lockheed produced
fifteen A-12 Oxcarts, three YF-12As, and thirty-one SR-71 Blackbirds. The
CIA’s John Parangosky wrote in summation, “The 49 supersonic aircraft had
completed more than 7,300 flights, with 17,000 hours in the air. Over 2,400
hours had been above Mach 3. Five OXCART were lost in accidents; two pilots
were killed, and two had narrow escapes. In addition, two F-101 chase planes
were lost with their Air Force pilots during OXCART testing phase.”

36. The CIA held a special secret ceremony at Area 51 : Interviews with Ken
Collins, Frank Murray, Colonel Slater, and Jack Layton. Vice Admiral Rufus L.
Taylor, deputy director of Central Intelligence, presented the CIA Intelligence
Star for Valor to Kenneth S. Collins, Ronald L. Layton, Francis J. Murray,

Dennis B. Sullivan, and Mele Vojvodich. Jack W. Weeks’s award was accepted
by his widow, Sharlene Weeks. The United States Air Force Legion of Merit was
presented to Colonel Hugh Slater and his deputy, Colonel Maynard N.
Amundson.

37. The men moved on : Interviews with Ken Collins, Colonel Slater, Frank
Murray, Charlie Trapp, Roger Andersen.

Chapter Seventeen: The MiGs of Area 51

Interviews: T. D. Barnes, Doris Barnes, Tony Landis, Peter Merlin, Colonel
Slater, Frank Murray, Roger Andersen, Grace Weismann (Joe Walker’s widow)

1. Iraqi air force colonel named Munir Redfa : Uzi Mahnaimi, “Stolen Iraqi
Jet Helped Israel Win Six-Day War,” Sunday Times of London, June 3, 2007.

2. “Turn back immediately” : Geller, Inside the Israeli Secret Service. I use
information from chapter 3, “Stealing a Soviet MiG.”

3. Redfa flew over Turkey : Obituary, “Major-General Meir Amit,” Telegraph,
July 22, 2009.

4. Amit sat down with the Israeli air force : Ibid.

5. James Jesus Angleton : Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder, 275. “Jim’s
interest in Israel was of exceptional value... To my knowledge, only Israel has
ever dedicated a monument to a foreign intelligence officer.” Angleton worked
as “the Agency’s liaison with the FBI... The best of Angleton’s operational work
is still classified and in my view should remain so.”

6. Agency’s most enigmatic and bellicose spies : Author visit to CIA spy
museum, CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia.

7. “wilderness of mirrors” : Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder, 277. The
phrase has become synonymous with Angleton’s thinking and most notably
included Angleton’s belief that the split between the Soviet Union and China
was not real. According to Helms, Angleton’s “conviction that the Sino-Soviet
split was mirage created by Soviet deception experts [was] interesting but simply
not true.”

8. when they worked in the OSS counterintelligence unit. X-2 : Ibid., chapter
28, “Beyond X-2.”

9. Helms’s status with President Johnson : Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 319.

10. But what didn’t make the news : Interviews with Colonel Slater, Frank
Murray, T. D. Barnes.

11. Doris was reading the classified : Interview with Doris Barnes.

12. Beatty. Nevada, was one strange town : Details about Beatty in the 1960s
come from interviews with Doris Barnes and T. D. Barnes.

13. “Daddy’s spaceship!” : Interviews with the Barnes’s two daughters, who
wish to remain anonymous.

14. where the X-15 could land if need be : Interview with Peter Merlin;
Barnes, “NASA X-15 Program,” 1.

15. Barnes got on the radio channel : The dates and data regarding X-15
mission flights can be found in Jenkins, Hypersonics Before the Shuttle. This
story of the missing audiotape comes from Barnes.

16. a catastrophic midair collision occurred : I tell the story as Barnes related
it to me. Another account appears in Donald Mallick’s The Smell of Kerosene,
132-35. Mallick was assigned the helicopter mission to locate Walker’s crash
site.

17. reverse engineering Colonel Redfa’s MiG : Interview with Barnes.

18. Test pilots flew a total of 102 MiG missions : Barnes, “Exploitation of
MiGs at Area 51, Project Have Doughnut,”

http://area51specialprojects.com/migs area51.html : Tolip, “Black Ops:
American Pilots Flying Russian Aircraft During the Cold War,”
MilitaryHeat.com, October 4, 2007.

19. gave birth to the Top Gun fighter-pilot school : Interview with Barnes.

20. The scales had tipped : Wilcox, Scream of Eagles, 76-77.

Chapter Eighteen: Meltdown

Interviews: Richard Mingus, T. D. Barnes, Troy Wade, Darwin Morgan,
Milton M. Klein, Harold B. Finger

1. to see what would happen : Atomic Energy Commission, Summary of
Project 57, the first safety test of Operation Plumbbob, report to the General
Manager by the Director, Division of Military Application, Objective, 24.

2. bomber flying with four armed hydrogen bombs : “Palomares Summary
Report,” Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico: Field Command Defense
Nuclear Agency Technology and Analysis Directorate, January 15, 1975.

3. SAC bombers would already be airborne : When LeMay left SAC in 1957
to become the Air Force vice chief of staff, he left behind a fighting force of
1,665 bomber aircraft, 68 bases around the world, and 224,014 men. The man
who took over was Thomas S. Powers.

4. “ all of a sudden, all hell ”: Ron Hayes, “H-bomb Incident Crippled Pilot’s
Career,” Palm Beach Post, January 17, 2007.

5. aerosolized plutonium : Gordon Dunning, “Protective and Remedial
Measures Taken Following Three Incidents of Fallout,” United States Atomic
Energy Commission, 1968. This was originally given as a speech called
“Radiation Protection of the Public in Large Scale Nuclear Disaster,” for an
international agency symposium in Interlaken, Switzerland, in May 1968.

6. President Johnson learned : Moran, Day We Lost the H-Bomb, 36.

7. official nuclear disaster response team : Memo, Secret, United States
Atomic Energy Commission, No. 234505, “Responsibility for Search and
Rescue Operations,” to M. E. Gates, Manager, Nevada Operations, November
19, 1974.

8. to assist in the cleanup efforts : Nuclear Weapon Accident Response
Procedures (NARP) Manual, Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Atomic
Energy), September 1990, xii.

9. “will never be known” : Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 408.

10. “I don’t know of any missing bomb” : Anthony Lake, “Lying Around
Washington,” Foreign Policy, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 93. Thirty-eight U.S. Navy
ships participated in the search for the bomb, which was eventually located five
miles offshore in 2,850 feet of water by a submersible called Alvin.

11. during a secret mission over Greenland : SAC History Staff, Project
Crested Ice, SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA, SPECIAL HANDLING
REQUIRED, AFR 127-4: FOIA 89-107 OAS-) 1793. This source document
provided many facts for this section.

12. A second fire started at the crash site : The cloud formed by the explosion
measured “850 m high, 800 m in length, and 800 m in depth, and undoubtedly
carried some plutonium downwind,” according to the Los Alamos National
Laboratory.

13. One of the bombs fell into the bay : Gordon Corea, “Mystery of Lost US
Nuclear Bomb,” BBC News, November 10, 2008.

14. “a cleanup undertaken as good housekeeping measures” : SAC History
Staff, Project Crested Ice, 28.

15. “ abundance of plutonium, americium, cesium ”: Rollins, “Nevada Test
Site—Site Description,” Table 2-4.

16. Called remote sensing : Department of Energy Fact Sheet DOE/NV
#1140. The Remote Sensing Laboratory was established in the 1950s, an
offshoot of atomic cloud sampling projects. Today, it is a secret industry about
which very little is known publicly;

http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/factsheets/DOENV 1140.pdf .

17. initially called the EG&G Remote Sensing Laboratory : EG&G Energy
Measurements Division (EG&G/EM) of EG&G, Inc., managed and operated the
research facility under DOE Contract DE-AC03-93NV11265. On January 1,
1996, Bechtel Nevada Corporation operated the research and production
facilities under DOE M&O Contract DE-AC08-96NV11718.

18. to secure the government contracts to clean things up : And what a
massive market it would become. In addition to future nuclear accidents, there
would be a colossal amount of radiation detection work to be done in, on, and
around the Pacific Proving Ground. Between 1946 and 1958, the Atomic Energy

Commission had exploded forty nuclear bombs, including the largest
thermonuclear bomb ever exploded by the United States, the fifteen-megaton
Castle Bravo bomb—a thousand times as powerful as the weapon dropped on
Hiroshima. In June of 1971, an EG&G crew was dispatched to Eniwetok Atoll
by the Atomic Energy Commission “for the purposes of pre-cleanup surveying.”
EG&G had armed, wired, and fired all the bombs in the Pacific. Now, using
radiation detection equipment, the company determined that the island was still
uninhabitable by all life forms in the water and the air—even after thirteen years.
But clean-up efforts could begin. These efforts would take decades, cost untold
dollars, and involve several different contractors. EG&G would lead the way.

19. EG&G had been taking radiation measurements : Interviews with A1
O’Donnell, Jim Freedman; Eniwetok Precleanup Survey Soil and Terrestrial,
Radiation Survey (Lynch, Gudiksen and Jones) No. 44878; draft revised 5/14/73.

20. corporate headquarters won’t say : Interview with Meagan Stafford,
EG&G/URS public relations, Sard Verbinnen & Co., July 16, 2010.

21. President Clinton was in 1994 : Interview with EG&G engineer. DOE
Openness Initiative, Human Radiation Experiments, EG&G Energy
Measurements, Las Vegas, Nevada, Finding Aids, Radioactive Fallout:
“EG&G/EM played an important role in monitoring airborne radiation from
weapons testing, and it retained many records relating to monitoring air-borne
radiation including reports on the Nevada Aerial Tracking Systems for the
1960s. The company has developed a computerized inventory of the collection
which includes some 24,000 classified documents, films, view-graphs, and other
materials. Currently the company is attempting to reorganize its archives into a
usable collection designed to accommodate future research efforts. The
dismantling process that was begun in 1986 has been halted. The CIC will retain
fallout records from the aboveground testing program. All other original
research documentation, film, note-books, and other records relating to
EG&G/EM’s important role in monitoring airborne radiation and weapons
testing, including reports and maps of cloud tracking still housed at EM, will be
retained by EM. Classified Material Control (CMC) contains numerous reports
on later testing programs and Aerial Tracking Systems reports for the 1960s. The
company also holds original survey data for the period before 1971, but this has
not been inventoried. There is an effort under way to obtain the funding to
inventory and create a computerized database for these records.”

22. the president did not have a need-to-know : Interview with EG&G
engineer.

23. one-line reference : Advisory Committee on Human Radiation
Experiments Final Report, 506-507.

24. If Area 51 had a doppelganger : At Groom Lake, for a thirteen-year period
beginning in 1955, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force comanaged spy plane
programs using science and technology to advance the art of aerial espionage.
Forty miles to the southwest, at Jackass Flats, beginning around 1955 and for a
period of seventeen years, the Atomic Energy Commission, NASA, and the
Department of Defense comanaged nuclear rocket programs using science and
technology to try to get man to Mars. There is an interesting paradox. At Area
51, the spy plane programs were funded by black budgets, meaning their
existence was hidden from Congress and the public. Not until they were
declassified by the CIA—the U-2 program in 1998 and the A-12 Oxcart program
in 2007—were their existences confirmed. The term Area 51 has remained
redacted, or blacked out, from declassified documents. When Air Force and CIA
officials are asked to comment on Area 51, they have no comment, because
technically the facility does not exist. At Area 25, the nuclear rocket ship
programs have been funded with public awareness. No one at the Air Force, the
Atomic Energy Commission, or NASA will deny that nuclear rocket
development went on there. But what was really going on behind the facade at
Jackass Flats has always been labeled Restricted Data, which is classified.

25. piloted by one hundred and fifty men : McPhee, The Curve of Binding
Energy, 168.

26. Taylor designed nuclear bombs for the Pentagon : According to Taylor’s
colleague the legendary Freeman Dyson, Ted Taylor made “the smallest, the
most elegant and the most efficient bombs... freehand without elaborate
calculation. When they were built and tested they worked.” Dyson left Princeton
University’s Institute for Advanced Study to work on the Mars spaceship with
Taylor.

27. “ Everyone seems to be making plans ”: McPhee, The Curve of Binding
Energy, 170.

28. same as a Coke machine : Ibid., 174.

29. “It would have been the most sensational thing anyone ever saw” : Ibid.

30. “Whoever builds Orion will control the Earth” : Ibid., 184.

31. Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, or SNPO : Dewar, To the End of the
Solar System, xix.

32. built into the side of a mountain : Interview with Barnes; see photographs.
On Nevada Test Site official maps, these mountains, in Area 25, are called
Calico Hills.

33. the underground tunnel was 1.150 feet long : “Corrective Investigation
Plan For Corrective Action Unit 165: Areas 25 and 26 Dry Well and Washdown
Areas, Nevada Test Site, Nevada.” DOE/NV-788, Environmental Restoration
Division, National Nuclear Security Administration, January 2002, 12.

34. 34 million to 249 million miles to Mars : According to NASA, “the
distance between Earth and Mars depends on the positions of the two planets in
their orbits. It can be as small as about 33,900,000 miles (54,500,000 kilometers)
or as large as about 249,000,000 miles (401,300,000 kilometers).”

35. a remote-controlled locomotive : DOE/NV #1150, “Last Stop for the
Jackass & Western.”

36. “ One hundredth of what one might receive ”: Ibid., 287.

37. Soviet satellites spying : Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, appendix
F, “The Russian Nuclear Rocket Program.” Dewar wrote, “The Soviets built a
test complex vaguely similar to Jackass Flats.”

38. 2.300 Kelvin : Finger and Robbins, “An Historical Perspective,” 7.

39. “The Pentagon released information after I filed a Freedom of
Information Act” : Interview with Lee Davidson. Davidson’s original 1990s story
is from the Deseret News, where he was the Washington bureau reporter for
twenty-eight years. During this time, Davidson reported on a number of secret
AEC radiation tests in Utah, at Dugway Proving Grounds. “They had a lot of
money to play with,” Davidson says of the AEC. “Here in Utah, they were trying
to figure out what a meltdown would look like from a number of different
angles. The AEC released more radiation in Utah than was released during the
partial meltdown at Three Mile Island.”

40. “Los Alamos wanted a run-awav reactor” : Dewar, To the End of the Solar
System, 280.

41. “ data on the most devastating accident possible ”: Ibid. Notably, Dewar
lays blame for the original idea of exploding the reactor on Los Alamos. The
nuclear laboratory may have come up with the idea but Los Alamos takes
marching orders from the Atomic Energy Commission, and in the end, the two
entities agreed to go ahead and explode the nuclear reactor on the grounds that it
was a safety test. “It was critical to know the total energy release in the
explosion and the amount and pattern of radioactive distribution,” Dewar wrote.

42. “ over 4000°C until it burst ”: Ibid., 281.

43. chunks as large as 148 pounds : Ibid., 282.

44. “equipped with samplers mounted on its wings” : Ibid., 281.

45. “ blew over Los Angeles ”: Ibid., 280.

46. “accurate data from which to base calculations” : Ibid., 285.

47. “I don’t recall that exact test” : Interview with Harold Finger.

48. code-named Phoebus : Barth, Delbert, Final Report of the Off-Site
Surveillance for the Phoebus 1-A Experiment, SWRHF-19r, January 17, 1966.
“The data collected indicate that radioactivity levels did not exceed the safety
criteria established by the Atomic Energy Commission for the off-site
population.”

49. “ suddenly it ran out of LH 2 ”: Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, 129.

50. cleanup crews in full protective gear could not enter the area for six
weeks : “Decontamination of Test Cell ‘C’ at the Nuclear Rocket Development
Station After a Reactor Accident,” January 18, 1967, LA-3633; Dewar, To the
End of the Solar System, 129-31.

51. long metal tongs : The workers dropped the radioactive chunks into one-
gallon paint cans, which were driven out of Area 25 on a lead dolly.

52. officially ended on January 5. 1973 : Dewar, To the End of the Solar
System, 203.

53. no such final test : Interview with Darwin Morgan.

54. records are “well organized and complete” : Ibid., 323.

55. “ Due to the destruction of two nuclear reactors ”: Rollins, “Nevada Test
Site—Site Description,” 25 of 99.

56. Milton Klein might know : Interview with Harold Finger; interview with
Milton Klein. Klein also says he “takes issue with the use of the word meltdown
because that’s not exactly what happens to a reactor when it’s deprived of
coolant.”

57. radioactive elements were still present : Table 3-2, “Corrective
Investigation Plan For Corrective Action Unit 165: Areas 25 and 26 Dry Well
and Washdown Areas, Nevada Test Site, Nevada,” 32.

312 “ ma y have percolated into underlying soil.” Ibid. Certainly, Barnes’s
eyewitness testimony suggests as much. “When we would run the reactor, we
had to clear out forty miles of the canyon around Calico Hills, it would emit that
much radiation,” Barnes explained. “And every time we ran the reactor, giant
dewars of water would flood the whole area, which would help cool everything
down. Enough water to make a temporary pond of water several feet deep.”

58. Area 25 began serving a new purpose : Interview with T. D. Barnes.

59. “It’s a PhD experience for first responders” : Film shown on a loop at the
Atomic Energy Museum in Las Vegas. Also in this section of the museum was a
photograph of Area 25, which depicted desert terrain interrupted by a bright blue
sign on a post that read: “EG&G Training 295-6820”—an indication that the
federal partner in WMD training at Area 25 was EG&G. Morgan denies this
partnership existed and insists EG&G stopped working as an “official
contractor” at the test site in the 1990s. The photograph at the Atomic Testing
Museum has since been taken down, but as of December 30, 2010, the telephone
number remained in service (using the local area code) with a voice mail stating:
“You have reached [name redacted] in the training department. Please leave a
message and I will return your call as soon as possible.”

60. one day a nuclear facility could very well melt down : For an
understanding of nuclear reactor physics, how a power reactor differs from a
nuclear rocket reactor, and how both differ from a nuclear bomb, see Dewar, To

the End of the Solar System, xvii.

61. five “boom vear(s)” : Rogovin, Three Mile Island Report, 182-83.

62. nuclear reactor “units” : Ibid., 182.

63. dispatched an EG&G remote sensing aircraft : EG&G, Inc., Las Vegas
Operations, “An Aerial Radiological Survey of the Three Mile Island Station
Nuclear Power Plant,” U.S. Department of Energy, 1977. The cover page of the
president’s commission on the accident at Three Mile Island features a thermal
photo accredited to EG&G.

64. “may be the best insurance that it will not reoccur” : Rogovin, Three Mile
Island Report, 5.

65. nuclear-powered Russian spy satellite crashed : Gates, Mahlon, Operation
Morning Light, Northwest Territories, Canada 1978, A Non-Technical Summary
of U.S. Participation; “The Soviet Space Nuclear Power Program,” Directorate
of Intelligence, CIA.

66. a decision was made not to inform the public : Weiss, “The Life and Death
of Cosmos 954.” Marked Secret, Not to be Released to Foreign Nationals, 7
pages, no date. Declassified 10/24/97.

67. “playing night baseball with the lights out” : Ibid., 2.

68. “It was extremely tense” : Interview with Richard Mingus.

69. NEST : Secret, United States Atomic Energy Commission, No. 234505,
Responsibility for Search and Rescue Operations, to M.E. Gates, Manager,
Nevada Operations. November 19, 1974; see also Gates, “Nuclear Emergency
Search Team,” 2, www.nci.org .

70. “ established within EG&G ”: Gates, “Nuclear Emergency Search Team,”

2 .

71. “space age difficulty” : “Cosmos 954: An Ugly Death,” Time magazine,
February 6, 1978.

would be panic like in The War of the Worlds: Interview with Richard
Mingus.

72. meant to look like bakery vans : Interview with Troy Wade.

73. Troy Wade was the lead federal official : Note that Mahlon Gates, who
authored Operation Morning Light and put together NEST, was the senior U.S.
government representative on the project and also the head of DOE Nevada
Operations but did not have an active role in the boots-on-the-ground operation.

74. high above was an Air Force U-2 : Weiss, “The Life and Death of Cosmos
954,” 3.

75. somewhere on America’s East Coast : Time magazine reported, “The craft
crashed into the atmosphere over a remote Canadian wilderness area last week,
apparently emitting strong radiation. American space scientists admitted that if
the satellite had failed one pass later in its decaying orbit, it would have plunged
toward Earth near New York City—at the height of the morning rush hour.”

Chapter Nineteen: The Lunar-Landing Conspiracy and Other Legends of
Area 51

Interviews: Buzz Aldrin, Colonel Slater, Ernie Williams, Richard Mingus,
Michael Schratt, Bill Irvine, James Oberg

1. July 20. 1969 : For details regarding Apollo 11, “Humankind’s first steps
on the lunar surface,” http://nasa.gov : for transcripts of the first lunar landing,
visit “Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal,” by Eric M. Jones,
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/all/all.landing.html .

2. Armstrong’s hundreds of hours flying : Jenkins, Hypersonics before the
Shuttle, appendix 9.

3. astronauts visited the Nevada Test Site : NASA, Appendix E. Geology
Field Exercises: Early Training, Field Training Schedule for the first 3 Groups of
Astronauts (29), 3, Feb 17-18 & 24-25, 1965 & March 3-4, 1965. “The trip
provided an opportunity to examine in detail the craters and ejecta formed by
detonation of subsurface nuclear devices in lavas and unconsolidated
sediments”; USGS Open-File Report 2005-1190, Table 1, “Geologic field¬
training of NASA Astronauts between January 1963 and November 1972.”

4. Ernie Williams was their guide : Interview with Ernie Williams.

5. first water well : Interviews with T. D. Barnes, Colonel Slater, Ernie
Williams.

6. astronauts arrived with a lunar rover vehicle : Gerald G. Schaber, “A
Chronology of Activities from Conception through the End of Project Apollo
(1960-1973),” U.S. Geological Survey, Branch of Astrogeology.

7. by-products of underground bomb tests : “The Containment of
Underground Nuclear Explosions,” #69043 Congress of the United States,

Office of Technology Assessment, 32.

8. astronauts twice referred to : DOE/NV 772 REV 1, “Apollo Astronauts
Train at the Nevada Test Site,” 2. The mission commentary voice transmissions
can be downloaded at

http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission trans/apollol7,htm .

9. hearing this comparison was a beautiful moment : Interview with Ernie
Williams.

10. Just two months after Armstrong and Aldrin returned : Author interview
with James Oberg, and from a chapter in his book UFOs and Outer Space
Mysteries. In addition to being an aerospace historian and leading debunker of
lunar-landing and UFO-on-the-moon conspiracies, Oberg spent his career as a
rocket scientist working for NASA contractors, including at Mission Control in
Houston, Texas.

11. moon being a base for aliens and UFOs : Interview with James Oberg.

12. Spielberg said in a 1978 interview : Matthew Alford, “Steven Spielberg,”
Cinema Papers, 1978.

13. With these three questions : The answers, presented by a popular Web site
dedicated to debunking the moon-hoax theory, are: Q: How can the American
flag flutter when there is no wind on the moon? A: The movement comes from
the twisting motion of the pole. Q: Why can’t the stars be seen in the moon
photographs? A: There are plenty of Apollo photos released by NASA in which
you can see stars. Q: Why is there no blast crater where Apollo’s landing vehicle
landed? A: The moon’s surface is covered by a rocky material called lunar
regolith, which responds to blast pressure similar to solid rock;
http://www.braeunig.us/space/hoax.htm .

14. he experienced “an intuitive feeling” : Fox Television broadcast,
“Conspiracy Theory: Did We Fand on the Moon?” February 15, 2001.

15. the Today show : A transcript of Kaysing’s interview with Katie Couric,
cohost of the Today show, which aired on NBC, August 8, 2001, can be read
online at Global Security.

16. canceled the book : Dr. David Whitehouse, “NASA Pulls Moon Hoax
Book,” BBC News, November 8, 2002.

17. CIA admitted it had been running mind-control programs : Marks, The
Search for the “Manchurian Candidate ,” 211. During the 1977 Senate hearings,
CIA director Stansfield Turner summed up some of MKUFTRA’s eleven-year
legacy: “The program contracted out work to 80 institutions, which included 44
colleges of universities, 15 research facilities or private companies, 12 hospitals

or clinics, and 3 penal institutions.”

18. 58.193 Americans were killed trying : The National Archives, Statistical
information about casualties of the Vietnam War, ARC ID: 306742.

19. Great Moon Hoax : Goodman, The Sun and the Moon, 12.

20. Buzz Aldrin. the second man on the moon : This section is based on my
interview with Buzz Aldrin, and also from chapter 20 in his book Magnificent
Desolation, which addresses the event and is called “A Blow Heard Around the
World,” 332-46 (galley copy).

21. 25 percent of the people interviewed : Brandon Griggs, “Could Moon
Landings Have Been Faked? Some Still Think So,” CNN, July 17, 2009. Griggs
noted that a “Google search this week for ‘Apollo moon landing hoax’ yielded
more than 1.5 billion results.”

22. involve captured aliens and UFOs : AboveTopSecret.com.

23. “ The tunnels were dug by a nuclear-powered drill ”: Interview with
Michael Schratt.

24. N-tunnels. P-tunnels. and T-tunnels : U.S. Congress, Office of Technology
Assessment, The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions.

25. “deactivated.” according to the Department of Energy : Michael R.
Williams, “Ground Test Facility for Propulsion and Power Modes of Nuclear
Engine Operation,” 4.

26. the revelation of the Greenbrier bunker : Ted Gup, “The Ultimate
Congressional Hideaway,” Washington Post, May 31, 1992.

27. “ Secrecy, denying knowledge of the existence ”: KCET American
Experience, “Race for the Superbomb,” interview with Paul Fritz Bugas, former
on-site superintendent, the Greenbrier bunker.

28. on average, twelve months : U.S. Congress, Office of Technology
Assessment, The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions, 18.

29. at least sixtv-seven nuclear bombs : U.S. Department of Energy, United
States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 through September 1992, 15.

30. Piledriver experiments studied survivability : Cherry and Rabb,

“Piledriver Drilling,” UCRL-ID-126150, August 9, 1967.

31. “ to destroy enemy targets Tsuch asl missile silos ”: Operation Hardtack II,
Defense Nuclear Agency, 3 December 1982; interview with DOE officials
during my tour of the Nevada Test Site, October 7, 2009.

32. guarding many of the nuclear bombs : Interview with Richard Mingus.

33. After the test ban, the Pentagon reversed its policy : U.S. Congress, Office
of Technology Assessment, The Containment of Underground Nuclear
Explosions, 21.

34. has changed its name four times : See NNSA Timeline,

http ://www,nnsa.energy, gov/aboutus/ourhistorv/timeline . Notably, there is
another agency that has changed its name four times, the Armed Forces Special
Weapons Project (AFSWP), which, like the Atomic Energy Commission, also
began as the Manhattan Project. On May 6, 1959, it changed its name to the
Defense Atomic Support Agency (DASA); on July 1, 1971, it changed its name
to the Defense Nuclear Agency; on June 26, 1996, it changed its name to the
Defense Special Weapons Agency. Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 61.

35. “ mission is to advance technology and promote related innovation ”:
Google DOE.gov and this statement is the subhead. Or go to
http://www.energy.gov/ .

36. formal beginning in 1908 : Federal Bureau of Investigation Official Web
site, Timeline of FBI History, 1900-1909.

37. Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko in a secret CIA prison : Edward Jay Epstein and
Susana Duncan, “The War of the Moles,” New York, 28-37.

38. His true allegiance remains the subject of debate : Walter Pincus, “Yuri I.
Nosenko, KGB Agent Who Defected to the U.S.,” Washington Post, August 27,
2008. In CIA documents released decades later, Nosenko is quoted as forgiving
the CIA for the harsh treatment, stating “while I regret my three years of
incarceration, I have no bitterness and now understand how it could happen.”
Shortly before he died, CIA officials gave Nosenko a ceremonial U.S. flag from
CIA director Michael Hayden.

39. memorandum dated May 1. 1995 : Memorandum to Members of the

Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, from Advisory
Committee Staff, May 1, 1995, “Official Classification Policy to Cover Up
Embarrassment.” Clinton Staff Memo is marked “Draft, For Discusssion
Purposes Only,” and cites 1947 memo listed below.

40. “ All documents and correspondence ”: “Report of Meeting of
Classification Board During Week of September 8, 1947,” Atomic Energy
Commission.

41. “ cause considerable concern to the Atomic Energy Commission insurance
Branch ”: September 28, 1947, memorandum from J.C. Franklin, manager Oak
Ridge Operations to Carroll L. Wilson, General Manager Re: Medical Policy, 2-
3; located circa 1995 by Clinton staff.

42. “ medical papers on human administration experiments done to date ”:

Ibid.

43. “reworded or deleted” : October 8, 1947, Memorandum to Advisory
Board on Medical and Biology Re: Medical Policy, 8; located circa 1995 by
Clinton staff.

44. In 2011 there are an estimated 1.8 billion Internet users : According to
Mini watts Marketing Group.

45. Deny Ignorance : Interview with AboveTopSecret CEO Bill Irvine.

46. the New World Order conspiracy theory : Wikipedia has an interesting
overview of New World conspiracy theories, with bibliography.

Chapter Twenty: From Camera Bays to Weapons Bays, the Air Force Takes
Control

Interviews: Richard Mingus, Ed Lovick, Bob Murphy, T. D. Barnes, Gene
Poteat, Peter Merlin, Harry Martin, Millie Meierdierck, Dr. Wheelon, Joe Behne

1. most sensational near catastrophes : Interview with Richard Mingus.
Interview with Joe Behne.

2. a mock helicopter attack : The details of the mock helicopter attack remain
classified. Darwin Morgan, spokesman for the NNSA, Nevada Site Office,
would neither confirm nor deny the event. Both Mingus and Behne were able to
discuss this event with me because the details of the helicopter attack were only
ever relayed to them secondhand. Their jobs had to do with the nuclear bomb
going down the hole. In other words, while both men were privy to the security
scare, neither man was ever officially briefed on the mock attack.

3. The bomb, one of eighteen : U.S. Department of Energy, United States
Nuclear Tests, July 1945 through September 1992, 14.

4. five-man security response team : Interview with Mingus. This is one of the
rare security stories from the secret base. Mingus tells it because the procedure is
now obsolete.

5. Quick conversation with Joe Behne : Interview with Joe Behne.

6. With astounding lack of foresight. Wackenhut Security : Interview with
Richard Mingus. Interview with Joe Behne.

7. using slide rules and calculators : Interview with Ed Lovick.

8. “ roughly the size of a ball bearing ”: Interview with Lovick and specifically
“based on 15GhHz radar, .08 wavelength.”

9. The man in charge of engineering, fabrication, and assembly : Interviews
with Bob Murphy.

10. at Groom Lake to drop bombs : Barnes points out that some bombs were
dropped close in to the dry lake bed at Area 51.

11. to use a preexisting, little-known bombing range : Johnson, “Tonopah Test

Range Outpost of Sandia National Laboratories,” Sandia Report SAND96-0375
UC-700 March 1996, U.S. DOE Contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.

12. the Chicago of the West : State Historic Preservation Office, Beatty,

Center of the Gold Railroads, “Chicago of the West,” Nevada Historical Marker
173.

13. “secret testing [that! could be conducted safely and securely” : Johnson,
“Tonopah Test Range Outpost of Sandia National Laboratories,” 8.

14. would quote Saint Paul of Tarsus : Ibid., 9.

15. Operation Roller Coaster, three dirty bomb tests : Ibid., 47; Operation
Roller Coaster Sites, TTR SAFER Plan, Section 2.0. Map here : NVO-171
Environmental Plutonium on the Nevada Test Site and Environs, June 1977, 35.

16. construction for an F-117 Nighthawk support facility : Interview with
Peter Merlin.

17. grow their hair long and to grow beards : Interview with Richard Mingus,
who lived there.

18. test flights of the F-117 : Crickmore, Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, 4. Major
A1 Whitley became the first operational pilot to fly the Nighthawk in October of
that year.

19. Lieutenant General Robert M. Bond : U.S. Air Force official Web site,
biography.

20. men like General James “Jimmy” Doolittle : Interview with Harry Martin.

21. “ There was some debate about whether the general ”: Barnes had left Area
51 by this time; this is a secondhand story. Having been involved in the MiG
program since its inception, Barnes was privy to information about Bond but
was never formally briefed.

22. were the general’s last words : Transcript reads: 10:17:50 a.m., Bond:
“How far to the turn?” 10:17:53 a.m. Ground control: “Turn now, right 20.”

Bond responds with two clicks. At 10:18:02 a.m. Bond: “I’m out of control. I’m
out of...” At 10:18:23 a.m. Bond: “I’ve got to get out, I’m out of control.”

23. Fred Hoffman, a military writer : Hoffman, “Allies Help Pentagon Obtain

Soviet Arms,” Associated Press, May 7, 1984.

24. at Area 51 and Area 52 for eleven years : Johnson, “Tonopah Test Range
Outpost of Sandia National Laboratories,” 79. The first flight of Have Blue was
December 1, 1977, by Bill Park at 7:00 p.m. as noted in Crickmore, Lockheed F-
117 Nighthawk.

25. Code-named Aquiline : Hank Meierdierck’s personal papers; interview
with Jim Freedman; interview with Millie Meierdierck, who had the only known
mock-up of the drone sitting on the bar in her home.

26. original purpose of Aquiline : Interview with Gene Poteat.

27. Cold War Soviet hydrofoil named Ekranopian : James May, “Riding the
Caspian Sea Monster,” BBC News magazine, September 27, 2008.

28. Jim Freedman to assist him on the Aquiline drone : Interview with Jim
Freedman.

29. ninety-nine million dollars over budget : Hank Meierdierck’s personal
papers.

30. Project Ornithopter : Richelson, Wizards of Langley, 148.

31. Project Insectothopter : Seen by the author at the CIA museum, located
inside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

32. “ Acoustic Kitty ”: Richelson, Wizards of Langley, 147.

33. sensor drones to detect WMD signatures : Interview with Dr. Wheelon.

34. Early efforts had been made using U-2 pilots : Interview with Tony
Bevacqua, who flew “sniffer” missions in U-2s for the U.S. Air Force. The
Black Cat pilots flew some of these dangerous missions, per my interview with
Colonel Slater.

35. Operation Tobasco. risked exposure : Richelson, Wizards of Langley, 93-
94.

36. did considerable damage to the Agency’s reputation : Marks, Search for
the “Manchurian Candidate,” 220. Marks’s entire chapter 12, “The Search for
Truth,” is a particularly searing portrait of how the CIA was perceived during

this time.

37. “ probable biological warfare research ”: CIA Top Secret, Biological
Warfare, USSR: Additional Rumors of an Accident at the Biological Warfare
Institute in Sverdlovsk. Dated October 15, 1979. Declassified 6/10/96.

38. Hellfire missiles : Lockheed makes the Hellfire, which is an acronym for
its original design: helicopter-launched, fire-and-forget.

39. his name was Osama bin Laden : Coll, Ghost Wars, 533: “While hovering
over Tarnak Farm outside Kandahar, the Predator photographed a man who
appeared to be bin Laden.”

Chapter Twenty-one: Revelation

Interviews: T. D. Barnes, Colonel Leghorn, Hervey Stockman, Gerald
Posner, Stephen Younger, John Pike, Gene Poteat, EG&G engineer, David
Myhra

1. engineers and aerodvnamicists had concerns : Interview with Barnes. This
is educated speculation; Barnes did not work on the drone project. Coll also
writes about this.

2. targeted assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal : December
4, 1981, President Ronald Reagan Executive Order 12333.

3. State Department gave the go-ahead : Coll, Ghost Wars, 539.

4. CIA and the Air Force teamed up for an unusual building project : Ibid.,
534. “The Air Force ought to pay for the Afghan operation, CIA officers
believed, in part because the Pentagon was learning more about the drone’s
capabilities in a month than they could in a half a year of sterile testing in
Nevada... Having seen the images of bin Laden walking toward the mosque at
Tarnak, Black was now a vocal advocate of affixing missiles to the drone.”

5. on the outer reaches of Area 51 : In Ghost Wars, Steve Coll places the
mock-up “in Nevada” (549). One source interviewed by me placed the mock-up
at Area 51; a second source interviewed by me placed the mock-up inside the
Nevada Test and Training Range (speculating Area 52). The exact location
where this took place remains classified.

6. CIA director George Tenet decided : Coll, G host Wars, 535. “There was a
child’s swing. Families lived at Tarnak. The CIA estimated that the compound
contained about one hundred women and children—bin Laden’s family and
family members of some top aides.” Tenet would have made the final call.

7. CIA drones provided intelligence for NATO forces : Jim Garamone,
“Predator Demonstrates Worth Over Kosovo,” American Forces Press Service,
September 21, 1999.

8. The first reconnaissance drone mission in the war on terror: 9/11

Commission Report, 213-214.

9. “a very successful tactical operation” : Wolfowitz’s interview with CNN
anchor Maria Ressa appeared in print as “U.S. Missile Strike Kills al Qaeda
Chief,” CNN, November 5, 2002. Wolfowitz added, “one hopes each time you
get a success like that, not only to have gotten rid of somebody dangerous, but to
have imposed changes in their tactics and operations and procedures.”

10. exclusive interview to the Christian Science Monitor : Yemeni Official
Says US Lacks Discretion as Antiterror Partner,” Christian Science Monitor,
November 12, 2002.

11. Hull spoke Arabic : Ibid.; Seymour Hersh, “Manhunt: The Bush
Administration’s New Strategy in the War Against Terrorism,” New Yorker,
December 23, 2002.

12. Mohammed Atef. in Jalalabad. Afghanistan : Peter Bergen and Katherine
Tiedemann, “The Drone War: Are Predators Our Best Weapon or Worst Enemy,”
New Republic, June 3, 2009.

13. targeted assassination spearheaded by the CIA : Mark Hosenball and Evan
Thomas, “The Opening Shot,” Newsweek, November 18, 2002.

14. Predator got a new designation : MQ-1B Predator, official Web site of
U.S. Air Force, fact sheet.

15. company that built the Predator : General Atomics Aeronautical,
http://www.ga-asi.com/ accessed December 30, 2010.

16. “ big differences between the Reaper and the Predator ”: Travis Edwards,
“First MQ-9 Reaper Makes Its Home on Nevada Flightline,” U.S. Air Force
Public Affairs, March 14, 2007.

17. Brigadier General Frank Gorenc was remotely viewing : Major John
Hutcheson, “Balad Predator Strikes Insurgents Placing Roadside Bomb Near
Balad,” Red Tail Flyer, 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, Public Affairs, Balad Air
Base, Iraq, March 31, 2006, 5.

18. “put a weapon on a target within minutes” : Ibid.

19. By 2009 the number of drone strikes would rise to fifty-three :
http://www.longwarjournal.org/pakistan-strikes.php : these numbers vary. Peter
Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann are considered the authorities on the subject of

drone strikes. The pair keep track of numbers and provide analysis for
organizations including New America Foundation and the New Republic
magazine.

20. “ These are just the assets we know about ”: This is because when missiles
are fired it is often the work of the CIA, and CIA drone strikes are not made
public. As per my interview with Pentagon officials, “That we can’t confirm or
deny.” State Department officials also refuse to comment on CIA drone attacks
and deflect attempts to get confirmation on the CIA’s role in drone operations.
While visiting Pakistan in December of 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
told a group of journalists who were inquiring specifically about drone strikes,
“I’m not going to comment on any particular tactic or technology.” In reality, the
strategic partnership between the CIA and the Air Force that began with Bissell’s
CIA and LeMay’s Air Force in 1955 is back together again.

21. the Beast of Kandahar : Originally reported by Air & Cosmos magazine,
http://www.air-cosmos.com/site/ . the story was quickly picked up in the U.S.
press. David Hambling, “Mysteries Surround Afghanistan’s Stealth Drone,”
Wired magazine, Danger Room Blog, December 4, 2009; interview with
unnamed Lockheed official.

22. Defense Department confirmed : Interview with secretary of the Air
Force, Public Affairs Engagements Office.

23. synthetic aperture radar, or SAR : Sandia National Laboratories: Synthetic
Aperture Radar: What is Synthetic Aperture Radar? Sandia Synthetic Aperture
Radar Programs (Unclassified programs and participants);
http://www.sandia.gov/ .

24. thirty miles south of Area 51. at Indian Springs : Physical tour of Creech
Air Force Base, Indian Springs, Nevada, October 9, 2009.

25. “Wicked Problems” : “Report of the Defense Science Board, 2008
Summer Study on Capability Surprise, Volume II: Supporting Papers, January
2010. Office of the Under Secretary of Defense For Acquisition, Technology,
and Logistics, Washington, DC, 20301-3140, chapter 2, Appendix 2-A, Wicked
Problems, 127-31.

26. “playing the game changes the game” : Ibid., 127.

27. shot down one of their own : Carl Hoffman, “China’s Space Threat: How
Missiles Could Target U.S. Satellites,” Popular Mechanics, July 2007.

28. The official Pentagon story : Jim Garamone, “Navy to Shoot Down
Malfunctioning Satellite,” American Forces Press Service, February 14, 2008;
“Navy Says Missile Smashed Wayward Satellite,” MSNBC.com News Services,
February 21, 2008; “U.S. Missile Shoots Down Satellite—But Why?” Christian
Science Monitor, February 22, 2008.

29. not required to tell the truth to Congress : Killian, Sputnik, Scientists and
Eisenhower, 25.

30. “A satellite cannot simply drop a bomb” : Ibid., 287. Killian originally
wrote this as “a study of space science and technology made at the request of the
President for the non technical reader,” which was released from the White
House on March 26, 1958. “Much has been written about space as a future war
theatre, raising such questions as satellite bombers, military bases on the moon
and so on... most of these schemes, nevertheless, appear to be clumsy and
ineffective ways of doing a job. Take one example, the satellite as a bomb
carrier. A satellite simply cannot drop a bomb.”

31. by his own admission, was not a scientist : James Killian had only an
undergraduate degree in management, as per my interview with MIT’s archivist
who researched the question for me in March of 2010.

32. United States Space Surveillance Network : NASA Orbital Debris
Program Office, Frequently Asked Questions, July 2009,
http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/faqs.html .

33. “ A one-centimeter object is very hard to track ”: Carl Hoffman, “China’s
Space Threat: How Missiles Could Target U.S. Satellites,” Popular Mechanics,
July 2007.

34. “ spy satellites launched into space ”: Interview with Colonel Leghorn.

35. Leghorn founded the Itek Corporation : Itek, which stood for Information
(J) Technology ( tek ), was founded in 1957 with seed money from venture
capitalist Laurance Rockefeller. Itek built Corona cameras from the beginning of
the program until Corona ended in 1972. The CIA/NRO follow-on systems were
contracted out to Perkin-Elmer; interviews with Colonel Leghorn, Dr. Wheelon.

In his memoir, Helms wrote, “Corona flew 145 secret missions, with equally
rewarding results,” 267.

36. Leghorn spent decades in the commercial-satellite business : U.S. Air
Force official Web site, Biography of Colonel Richard Sully Leghorn, Retired,
Air Force Space Command, http://www.afspc.af.mil/library/biographies/bio.asp?
id=9942 .

37. W61 Earth Penetrator : Leland Johnson, “Sandia Report: Tonopah Test
Range Outpost of Sandia National Laboratories, SAND96-0375, UC-700,”
March 1996, 80.

38. launch the earth-penetrator weapon : Nelson, “Low-Yield Earth-
Penetrating Nuclear Weapons,” 3, figure 3.

39. and signed by five of the then seven or eight nuclear-capable countries :
Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization ( http ://www.ctbto. org /1 .
The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was signed by the United States,
China, France, the United Kingdom, and Russia on September 26, 1996, in New
York. The nuclear-armed states who did not sign (and as of 2011 have not
signed) are India, Israel, and Pakistan. According to CTBTO, Israel has not
reported testing but is generally assumed to be a nuclear-armed state. In 2006,
Korea announced that it had conducted a nuclear test. Notably, the 1963 Partial
Test Ban Treaty, to which I also refer, prohibits nuclear explosions in the
atmosphere, outer space, and underwater but allowed for underground nuclear
tests. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty of 1996 prohibits all nuclear
explosions, including those conducted underground.

40. Rods from God : Eric Adams, “Rods from God,” Popular Science, June 1,
2004.

41. “ that’s enough force ”: Interview with Barnes.

42. “long-rod penetration” : Nelson, “Low-Yield Earth-Penetrating Nuclear
Weapons,” 4.

43. April 1999 report : JSR-97-155, “Characterization of Underground
Facilities.” JASON, MITRE Corporation, McLean, Virginia.

44. Los Alamos fired back : Interview with Stephen Younger.

45. operations at the Nevada Test Site : “NSTec Contracted to Operate NNSA
Test Site,” United Press International, December 22, 2008. Interview with
Stephen Younger.

46. In 2006. the Senate dropped the line item : CRS Report for Congress,
“Bunker Busters”: Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator Issues, FY2005-FY2007;
Domenici: RNEP Funds Dropped from Appropriations Bill,” press release,
Senator Pete Domenici, October 25, 2005, FY2006 hearings. From the
transcript: Representative Terry Everett: “Could you please tell me directly if
there’s a military need for this, for robust earth-nuclear earth penetrator?”
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: “It is a question that’s difficult to
answer, because sometimes they say ‘military requirement.’ And that’s a formal
process. There was no military requirement for unmanned aerial vehicles until
they came along.”

47. proposed to revive the NERVA program : Michael R. Williams, “Ground
Test Facility for Propulsion and Power Modes of Nuclear Engine Operation,”
Savannah River National Eaboratory, Department of Energy, WSRC-MS-2004-
00842.

48. six hundred million pages of information : Pauline Jelinek, “U.S. Releases
Nazi Papers,” Associated Press, November 2, 1999.

49. Many documents about Area 51 exist in that pile : Interviews with EG&G
engineer.

50. the Roswell crash remains : which certainly explains why the CIA and the
Air Force have not been able to locate Roswell crash remains in their archives.

51. the most powerful defense contractor in the nation : In 1999, EG&G was
acquired by the Carlyle Group. In 2002 it was acquired by URS. In 2000, EG&G
formed a joint venture with Raytheon to create JT3 (Joint Test, Tactics, and
Training) LLC, which provides “engineering and technical support for the
Nevada Test and Training Range, the Air Force Flight Test Center, the Utah Test
and Training Range, and the Electronic Combat Range.” Interview with Meagan
Stafford, EG&G/URS Public Relations, Sard Verbinnen & Co., July 16, 2010.

52. former dean of engineering at MIT : Vannevar Bush papers located at
National Security Archives, Truman Library, the Roosevelt Library, and MIT
Archives; Zachary, Endless Frontier, Library of Congress, “Vannevar Bush, a

Collection of His Papers in the Library of Congress,” Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

53. kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele : Interview with Gerald Posner; Posner
and Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story, 83.

54. performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures : Spitz, Doctors
From Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans. Spitz worked
as a typist during the Nuremberg trials. Forgiving Dr. Mengele, a film by Bob
Hercules and Cheri Pugh (2006); CANDLES Holocaust Museum, Biography of
Eva Mozes Kor. The Japanese also performed grotesque experiments on humans
during the war. “U.S. War Department, War Crimes Office, Judge Advocate
General’s Office, #770475.” Japan’s version of Josef Mengele, General Ishii,
was pardoned by the U.S. War Crimes Office on the grounds that information
regarding the grotesque medical experiments he performed would somehow
benefit the United States. Although it is science fiction, The Island of Dr.
Moreau, written in 1896 by H. G. Wells, tells a twisted tale of human
experimentation on a remote island.

55. children, dwarfs, and twins : Koren and Negev, In Our Hearts We Were
Giants, 85-197.

56. Josef Mengele’s efforts to create a pure. Aryan race : Erik Kirschbaum,
“Cloning Wakes German Memories of Nazi Master Race,” Reuters, February 27,
1997. America is not exempt from eugenic theology; see Edwin Black,

“Eugenics and the Nazis: The California Connection,” San Francisco Chronicle,
November 9, 2003.

57. painter named Dina Babbitt : Ibid., 103-31 and photographic inserts.
Bruce Weber, “Dina Babbitt, Artist at Auschwitz, Is Dead at 86,” New York
Times, August 1, 2009. Babbitt’s maiden name (used at Auschwitz) was
Gottlieb.

58. Dr. Martina Puzvna : Koren and Negev, In Our Hearts We Were Giants,
109.

59. According to his only son. Rolf : Interview with Gerald Posner. Posner
interviewed Rolf Mengele and was given access to 5,000 pages of Mengele’s
written correspondence as well as his personal journals written after the war.

60. Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain : Interview with EG&G
engineer.

61. Mengele never took up residence in the Soviet Union : Interview with
Posner.

62. Eileen Welsome wrote a newspaper story : Eileen Welsome, “The
Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War,”
Albuquerque Tribune, November 1993.

63. direct violation of the Nuremberg Code : Trials of War Criminals before
the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, Vol. 2,
Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949. Nuremberg Code: (1).
The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. (2). The
experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society,
unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and
unnecessary in nature. Full text available at
http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/guidelines/nuremberg.html .

64. President Clinton opened an investigation . The advisory committee was
made of fourteen members who reported to the president through a cabinet-level
group called the Human Radiation Interagency Working Group, and it included
the secretaries of defense and energy (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission)
as well as the attorney general and the director of the CIA. The committee was
dissolved in October of 1995 after publishing its findings. Today, the Office of
Health, Safety and Security (HSS), a Department of Energy office, maintains a
Web site. Of its efforts, DOE says, “We have undertaken an intensive effort to
identify and catalogue relevant historical documents from DOE’s 3.2 million
cubic feet of records scattered across the country.” Given that there are
approximately 2,000 pages of documents in a single cubic foot, it is telling that a
record search for “EG&G” at the HSS/DOE database delivers a paltry 500
documents.

Epilogue

Interviews: Colonel Leghorn, Ed Lovick, EG&G engineer, David Myhra

1. Army Air Forces commemorative yearbook : This is the government-issued
“Official Report, Task Force 1.52” and is meant to look like a high school
yearbook.

2. The U.S. government spent nearly two billion dollars : Atomic Audit, 102.
“Operation Crossroads was an astonishing $1.3 billion [circa 1996 dollars], far
more than any of the subsequent thermonuclear tests conducted during the
1950s.”

3. Truman’s closest advisers : “Potsdam and the Final Decision to Use the
Bomb,” Department of Energy Archives ( http://www.cfo.doe.gov/ ): “During the
second week of Allied deliberations at Potsdam, on the evening of July 24, 1945,
Truman approached Stalin without an interpreter and, as casually as he could,
told him that the United States had a ‘new weapon of unusual destructive force.’
Stalin showed little interest, replying only that he hoped the United States would
make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’ The reason for Stalin’s composure
became clear later: Soviet intelligence had been receiving information about the
atomic bomb program since fall 1941.”

4. Stalin’s black propaganda hoax : Interview with EG&G engineer.

5. “a warning shot across Truman’s bow” : Interview with EG&G engineer.
The engineer says this information was relayed to him by his EG&G boss, who
had been given the information by a government superior. One cannot rule out
the possibility that the elite EG&G engineers were given false information as a
means of coercing them into participating in a morally reprehensible program; in
1951, there was no greater enemy to the free world than Joseph Stalin. Until
Russia opens its UFO archives, Stalin’s side of the story will remain unknown,
but since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s interest in UFOs has come to
light. In Korolev, Professor James Harford discusses an incident where Stalin
asked his chief rocket designer, Sergei Korolev, to study UFOs (See here , here).
In 2002, Pravda.ru ran a story called “Stalin’s UFOs,” identifying the dictator’s
Roswell/UFO research team as “mathematician Mstislav Keldysh, chemist
Alexander Topchiyev, and physician [sic] Sergey [sic] Korolev.” Other

ufologists identify Stalin’s UFO team as Sergei Korolev, missile designer and
inventor of Sputnik; Igor Kurchatov, father of Russia’s atomic bomb; and
Mstislav Keldysh, mathematician, theoretician, and space pioneer (see
photographic insert).

6. “Hitler invented stealth.” says Gene Poteat : Interview with Gene Poteat.
Also from Poteat’s participation in the CIA’s Oxcart panel discussion at the
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy
Center, September 24, 2010.

7. Whatever happened to the Horten brothers : Interview with David Myhra.

8. captured by the U.S, Ninth Army on April 7. 1945 : Myhra, The Horten
Brothers and Their All Wing Aircraft, 229.

9. London high-rise near Hyde Park : Ibid., 230.

10. Theodore von Karman : National Aviation Hall of Fame, biography,
Theodore von Karman. http://www.nationalaviation.org/von-karman-theodore/ .
Myhra, The Horten Brothers and Their All Wing Aircraft, 230.

11. tapes can be found : National Air and Space Museum, Archives Division,
Reimar and Walter Horten Interviews, Accession No. 1999-0065.

12. “ Reimar had me agree to two restrictions ”: Interview with David Myhra.

13. 2010 Freedom of Information Act request : Letter, October 29, 2010, to
Ms. Annie Jacobsen from Nathan L. Mitchell, Assistant to the General Counsel,
Department of the Army, Office of the General Counsel, 104 Army Pentagon,
Washington DC.

14. another [important! engineer : The name of this engineer and his
employment with EG&G during the 1950s have been verified with other former
EG&G employees.

15. empty lot of asphalt : The lot is adjacent to the buildings identified as
EG&G’s original Las Vegas headquarters in a film about the history of the
Nevada Test Site, funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration,
Nevada Site Office: “When EG&G first moved to Las Vegas, their headquarters
were located on ‘A’ Street now called Commerce.”

16. “Little wooden discs”: Interview with Ed Lovick.

17. sworn affidavit : “Dead Airman’s Affidavit: Roswell Aliens Were Real.”
Fox News.com, July 3, 2007.

http://www.foxnews.eom/story/0.2933.287643.00.html . accessed December 30,
2010.

18. “ It’s difficult ”: Written correspondence with Bob Lazar, 2010.

19. hidden inside secret “Restricted Data” files : Interview with EG&G
engineer.

20. Vannevar Bush : To further understand Vannevar Bush, I reviewed his
papers, letters, and hand-edited drafts of his articles, books, and monographs
from three major collections: Vannevar Bush, “A Collection of His Papers in the
Library of Congress,” Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington,
DC; Vannevar Bush, “Office of Scientific Research and Development,” National
Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland; Vannevar Bush
Papers, Carnegie Institute, Washington, DC.

21. human experiments to study the effects : The trials involved high
concentrations of lewisite and mustard gas. Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments, Final Report, 98; Veterans at Risk: The Health Effects of
Mustard Gas and Lewisite, 66-69.

22. “ Although the human subjects ”: Ibid., 66.

23. Dixon Institute... Feeble-Minded : Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments, Final Report, Chapter Seven, Nontherapeutic Research
on Children, 320-351. Dr. Susan Lederer, Military Medical Ethics, Volume 2,
“The Cold War and Beyond: Covert and Deceptive American Medical
Experiments,” 514. Lederer, a Clinton committee staff member, cites D. J.
Rothman, Strangers at the Bedside: A History of How Law and Bioethics
Transformed Medical Decision Making, Basic Books, 1991.

24. letter-number designation of S-l : Gosling, The Manhattan Project:
Making the Atomic Bomb, 10.

25. JT3: From the company Web site f http://www.jt3.com /L accessed
October 18, 2010. “The Department of Defense (DoD) has merged the
engineering and technical support management of several western ranges into
one organization to streamline support for test and training customers. In

response to this challenge, URS (URS) and Raytheon Technical Services
Company (RTSC) formed JT3, a Limited Liability Company (LLC) dedicated to
supporting Joint Range Technical Services (J-Tech) requirements. We are experts
at assisting our customers and other contractors in the planning, preparation, and
execution of test projects and training missions.”

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY INTERVIEWS

The individuals listed below, by birth year, did many things in their long careers.
Noted are topics we discussed during our interviews. All military officers and
intelligence agency personnel are retired.

Helen Kleyla (1913- ). Longtime secretary to CIA deputy director Richard
Bissell.

CIA, Richard Bissell, Area 51, Bay of Pigs.

Interviews: Written correspondence, fall 2009

Colonel Richard S. Leghorn (1919- ). The father of peacetime overhead
espionage.

Army Air Forces, USAF, CIA, World War II, Korean War; U-2, MiG, Corona
satellite system, reconnaissance over Normandy, overhead espionage, Operation
Crossroads, General Curtis LeMay.

Interviews: July 21, 2009; July 24, 2009; February 10, 2010; written
correspondence: July 2009-October 2010

Edward Lovick Jr. (1919-). The father of stealth technology.

Lockheed Skunk Works, U-2, A-12 Oxcart, SR-71 Blackbird, D-21 drone,
Harvey, Have Blue, F-117 Nighthawk, Project Kempster-Lacroix, radar testing,
and pole testing at Area 51.

Interviews: January 5, 2008; February 7, 2008; March 6, 2008; April 3,
2008; April 18, 2008; April 29, 2008; May 29, 2008; June 6, 2008; June 18,
2008; July 2, 2008; July 10, 2008; July 23, 2008; July 30, 2008; August 6, 2008;
August 13, 2008; August 21, 2008; August 28, 2008; September 4, 2008;
November 18, 2008; December 9, 2008; January 6, 2009; January 20, 2009;
March 17, 2009; March 30, 2009; June 11, 2009; June 28, 2009; August 1,

2009; February 28, 2010; April 22, 2010; September 5, 2010; written
correspondence: February 2008-October 2010

Ray Goudey (1919- ). Flew U-2 “Ship One” at Area 51.

Lockheed test flights, U-2, Burbank to Area 51 flights.

Interviews: June 12, 2009; July 8, 2009; October 8, 2009

Fred White (1921- ). Wrote the flight manuals for Lockheed U-2, A-12, and
SR-71.

Lockheed Skunk Works, U-2, A-12, YF-12, SR-71, engineering projects at
Area 51.

Interviews: October 3, 2009; October 8, 2009; written correspondence:
October 2009-May 2010.

Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater (1922- ). Base commander at Area 51.

Army Air Force, USAF, CIA, A-12, YF-12, D-21 drone, commander of the
U-2 Chinese Black Cat Squadron, commander for Operation Black Shield, the
303 Committee.

Interviews: November 13, 2008; December 20, 2009; January 7, 2009;

March 4, 2009; April 25, 2009; June 25, 2009; July 14, 2009; October 7, 2009;
October 8, 2009; January 13, 2010

Alfred O’Donnell (1922- ), early Manhattan Project member. Armed, wired,
and fired 186 nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site and the Pacific Proving
Ground.

Nuclear weapons, World War II, Battle at Okinawa; timing, wiring, and firing
system on atomic bombs; timing, wiring, and firing system on thermonuclear
bombs; Operation Crossroads, Operation Greenhouse, Operation Ivy, Operation
Castle, Operation Plumbbob, Operation Hardtack, Nevada Test Site.

Interviews: May 9, 2009; May 25, 2009; May 27, 2009; June 24, 2009; June
25, 2009; July 15, 2009; September 7, 2009; September 8, 2009; October 6,
2009; October 7, 2009; November 17, 2009; December 14, 2009; December 15,
2009; December 16, 2009; January 13, 2010; January 14, 2010; February 11,
2010; March 6, 2010; June 28, 2010, June 29, 2010; written correspondence:
May 2009-October 2010

Colonel Hervey S. Stockman (1922-2011). First man to fly over the Soviet
Union in a U-2.

Army Air Forces, USAF, U-2 pilot, atomic-sampling pilot, fighter pilot in
World War II, Korea, and Vietnam; POW at the Hanoi Hilton and other prisons
from June 12, 1967-March 4, 1973.

Interviews: August 24, 2009; September 17, 2009; March 24, 2010

Colonel Sam Pizzo (1922- ). Navigation expert for the A-12 at Area 51 and
escort to Nikita Khrushchev from Moscow to America in 1959.

Strategic Air Command, USAF, A-12 Oxcart, Operation Home Run, celestial
navigation, General Curtis LeMay.

Interviews: April 22, 2009; April 24, 2009; May 19, 2009; May 21, 2009;
October 3, 2009; October 7, 2009; December 2, 2009; written correspondence:
April 2009-September 2010

General Hsichun “Mike” Hua (1926- ). Flew with U-2 Chinese Black Cat
Squadron.

CIA U-2 pilot, CIA air base at Taoyuan, Taiwan.

Interview: March 12, 2010; written correspondence: winter/spring 2010

Ralph James “Jim” Freedman (1927- ). Procurement manager at Area 51,
EG&G weapons test engineer, and nuclear explosion photographer.

EG&G, CIA, nuclear test liaison to Howard Hughes from Area 51, Nevada
Test Site, Operation Greenhouse, Operation Ivy, Operation Castle, A-12 Oxcart,
Project Aquiline.

Interviews: May 7, 2009; May 8, 2009; April 25, 2009; June 24, 2009;
September 8, 2009; October 8, 2009; December 15, 2009; June 28, 2010;

August 4, 2010; November 30, 2010.

Brigadier General Raymond L. Haupt (1927- ). The only man to fly all

three models of the Oxcart at Area 51.

USAF, U-2, A-12 Oxcart, YF-12, SR-71 Blackbird, Blackbird flight manuals,
Lockheed pilots, Area 51 operations.

Interviews: October 3, 2009; October 8, 2009

Major General Patrick J. Halloran (1928- ). Squadron operations officer
for the U-2, wing commander for the SR-71 Blackbird.

USAF, U-2, SR-71 Blackbird, U-2 shoot-downs over China.

Interview: June 12, 2009

Dr. Albert D. “Bud” Wheelon (1929- ). CIA’s first deputy director of
Science and Technology, also known as the mayor of Area 51.

Project Palladium, A-12 Oxcart, Cuban missile crisis, satellites, early missile
systems, TRW, defense contracting, MIT, President Kennedy, James Killian,
General Ledford, John McCone, Richard Helms, Lyman Kirkpatrick.

Interviews: May 29, 2009; November 9, 2009

Colonel Kenneth B. Collins (1930- ). A-12 Oxcart pilot for the CIA.

USAF, CIA, A-12 Oxcart pilot, SR-71 Blackbird pilot, Korean War, Vietnam
War, Operation Black Shield, Jack Weeks, Walt Ray.

Interviews: October 29, 2008; January 20, 2009; March 17, 2009; April 14,
2009; April 28, 2009; May 19, 2009; June 1, 2009; June 13, 2009; August 4,
2009; October 20, 2009; December 2, 2009; January 20, 2010, April 4, 2010,
August 6, 2010; written correspondence: October 2008-October 2010

Lieutenant Colonel Francis J. “Frank” Murray (1930- ). A-12 Oxcart
pilot for the CIA.

USAF, CIA, A-12 Oxcart pilot, F-101 pilot, Vietnam War, Operation Black
Shield, USS Pueblo, General Ledford, Walt Ray.

Interviews: March 4, 2009; March 5, 2009; April 28, 2009; October 6, 2009;
October 7, 2009; January 6, 2010; January 13, 2010; written correspondence:
March 2009-May 2010

Lieutenant Colonel Roger W. Andersen (1930- ). Area 51 command post
operations for Area 51 and Kadena Air Base during Operation Oxcart.

USAF, CIA, Nevada Test Site, atomic tests, Operation Black Shield.

Interviews: March 5, 2009; May 26, 2009; October 7, 2009; September 24,
2010; written correspondence: May 2009-September 2010

Robert “Bob” Murphy (1930- ). Lockheed Skunk Works engineer and
project airplane manager at Area 51.

U-2, A-12 Oxcart, D-21 drone, U-2 missions out of Asia, Have Blue, F-117
Nighthawk.

Interviews: July 4, 2009; July 20, 2009; September 24, 2010

William “Bill” Weaver (1930- ). Lockheed test pilot for the A-12, YF-12,
SR-71, and the only pilot to survive a Mach 3 bailout at 78,000 feet in an SR-71
Blackbird.

SR-71 Blackbird, high-speed bailouts, parachutes.

Interview: June 13, 2009

Captain Donald J. Donohue (1930- ). Crew captain for A-12 Oxcart at
Area 51.

USAF, A-12 Oxcart.

Interviews: May 8, 2009; December 9, 2009

Frank Micalizzi (1930- ). Warehouse supervisor at Area 51.

USAF, CIA, Kadena Air Force Base, A-12 Oxcart camera film storage.

Interview: May 8, 2009

Florence DeLuna (1930- ). Area 51 transport pilot.

USAF, C-47, Walt Ray, Dreamland airspace and air traffic control.

Interview: May 8, 2009

Ernest “Ernie” Williams (1930- ). Atomic Energy Commission motor pool
and food services coordinator, escorted the Apollo astronauts around the Nevada
Test Site.

AEC, Nevada Test Site, astronaut training.

Interviews: October 7, 2009; December 14, 2009

S. Eugene “Gene” Poteat (1930- ). Pioneer of electronic countermeasures,
first CIA officer assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office.

CIA, NRO, Project Palladium, Area 51 radar tests, U-2 and A-12, Caspian
Sea Monster, Project Aquiline.

Interviews: September 27, 2010; September 28, 2010; September 30, 2010

Richard Mingus (1931- ). Area 51 security, Nevada Test Site Security, and
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory operations manager.

Atomic Energy Commission, Department of Energy, Lawrence Radiation
Laboratory, Federal Services, Inc., Wackenhut Security, Inc., U-2 security guard,
Area 51 security, Area 52 security, Nevada Test Site, Tonopah Test Range,
Project 57, Operation Plumbbob, underground nuclear testing.

Interviews: September 9, 2009; October 8, 2009; November 18, 2009;
December 14, 2009; December 15, 2009; December 16, 2009; January 14,
2009; February 10, 2010; February 12, 2010; June 28, 2010; June 29, 2010

Harry Martin (1931- ). In charge of the million-gallon fuel farm at Area 51.

USAF, CIA, fuels, A-12 Oxcart.

Interviews: November 13, 2008; March 5, 2009; May 26, 2009

Lieutenant Colonel Tony Bevacqua (1932- ). Youngest pilot to fly U-2 at
Area 51.

USAF, U-2 pilot, SR-71 Blackbird pilot, Vietnam War, Kadena Air Force
Base, Gary Powers.

Interviews: June 12, 2009; June 13, 2009; October 8, 2009; written
correspondence: June 2009-October 2010

Colonel Charles E. “Charlie” Trapp (1933- ). Area 51 helicopter search-
and-rescue pilot.

USAF, C-47, Walt Ray, Dreamland airspace and air traffic control.

Interview: June 4, 2010; November 18, 2010; November 24, 2010

Troy Wade (1934- ). Longtime Nevada Test Site official, former assistant
secretary of energy for defense programs, ran Operation Morning Light for the
Department of Energy, Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation.

Atomic Energy Commission, Department of Energy, Nevada Test Site,
Operation Morning Light, underground nuclear testing.

Interviews: September 9, 2009; October 8, 2009; December 15, 2009

Wayne E. Pendleton (1935- ). EG&G radar expert.

Lockheed Skunk Works, EG&G radar range, National Reconnaissance
Office, Have Blue, Howard Hughes.

Interviews: October 3, 2009; October 7, 2009; April 22, 2010

Thornton “T.D.” Barnes (1937- ). Radar expert on multiple Area 51
projects.

CIA, EG&G, Atomic Energy Commission, NASA, Project Palladium, A-12
Oxcart, MiG, X-15 rocket plane, Apollo 1, NERVA, Nike missile system,
Hercules missile system, Have Blue.

Interviews: November 3, 2008; November 13, 2008; December 20, 2009;
December 21, 2009; January 7, 2009; March 4, 2009; March 5, 2009; March 6,
2009; April 24, 2009; April 25, 2009; May 7, 2009; May 8, 2009; May 26, 2009;
June 12, 2009; June 13, 2009; June 24, 2009; June 25, 2009; July 14, 2009;
September 7, 2009; September 9, 2009, October 7, 2009; October 8, 2009;
October 9, 2009, December 14, 2009; December 15, 2009; December 16, 2009;
January 13, 2010; January 14, 2010; February 11, 2010; February 12, 2010;
March 6, 2010; June 29, 2010; written correspondence: November 2008-
October 2010

Ken Swanson (1937- ). Electronic warfare, electronic countermeasures
expert, Red Dog/Blue Dog ECM System.

Interview: June 17, 2010

Sherre Lovick (1960- ). Lockheed Skunk Works engineer.

Lockheed Skunk Works, radar signature, defense contracting.

Interviews: February 7, 2008; March 6, 2008; April 3, 2008; April 29, 2008;

May 29, 2008; June 6, 2008; July 2, 2008; July 23, 2008; July 30, 2008; August
6, 2008; August 21, 2008; June 28, 2009

Colonel Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut and the second man on the moon

Dr. Robert B. Abernethy, Pratt and Whitney engineer; invented the Oxcart’s
J-58 engine

Joseph C. Behne Jr.: Former test director, Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory

Arthur Beidler, 67th Reconnaissance Tactical Squadron, Japan

Colonel Adelbert W. “Buz” Carpenter, SR-71 pilot

Harold B. Finger, former manager of AEC-NASA Space Nuclear Propulsion
Office

R. Cargill Hall, historian emeritus, National Reconnaissance Office

Milton M. Klein, former manager of AEC-NASA Space Nuclear Propulsion
Office

Darwin Morgan: National Nuclear Security Administration, spokesman
(current)

Dennis Nordquist, Pratt and Whitney mechanical engineer, J-58 engine

Grace Weismann: Joe Walker’s widow

Charles “Chuck” Wilson: U-2 pilot

Changti “Robin” Yeh: U-2 pilot, Chinese Black Cat Squadron

Secondary Interviews and Correspondence

Steven Aftergood
Joerg Arnu
Doris Barnes
Stacy Slater Bernhardt
Tim Brown
Fred Burton
Lee Davidson
Martha DeMarre
Jeanne Donohue
Stanton Friedman
Norio Hayakawa
Bill Irvine
George Knapp
Tony Landis

Eunice Layton

Colonel Ronald “Jack” Layton

Bob Lazar

Ken Leghorn

Jim Long

Dr. Craig Luther

Tom Mahood

Mary Martin

Millie Meierdierck

Peter W. Merlin

Martha Murphy

Mary Jane Murphy

Stella Murray

David Myhra

James Oberg

Ruth O’Donnell

Thomas O’Donnell

Major General Jude Pao

John E. Pike

Gerald Posner

Gary Powers Jr.

Dr. Jeffrey Richelson
Dr. David Robarge
Louise Schalk
P. W. Singer
Barbara Slater
Peter Slater
Peter Stockman
Sharlene Weeks
Stephen M. Younger
G. Pascal Zachary

Current and former employees from the following organizations, agencies, and

corporations were interviewed, some on the condition of anonymity.

National Security Agency (NSA)

National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)

National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA)

National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC)
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)

National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA)
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)

Department of Energy (DOE)

Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA)

National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
United States Air Force (USAF)

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

United States Army Air Forces (USAAF)

EG&G Special Projects Group
Fockheed Martin Corporation
Northrop Grumman
Raytheon

General Atomics Aeronautical
Hughes Aircraft Company
Summa Corporation

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June 4, 1939.

Wolverton, Mark. “Into the Mushroom Cloud.” Air and Space magazine,
August 1, 2009.

Oral Histories

Oral history interview with Richard M. Bissell Jr. by Theodore A. Wilson and
Richard D. McKinzie, East Hartford, Connecticut, July 9, 1971 (Harry S.

Truman Library and Museum).

Oral history interview with Robert Thomas, Los Alamos National

Laboratory, Headquarters DOE, 09/22/81. Box No. JNS0036 1-3. National
Radiobiology Archives Project.

Oral history interview with Air Force Colonel John Pickering, for the
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, by John Harbett and Gil
Whittemore, New Mexico, November 2, 1994.

Oral history interview with A1 O’Donnell, by Colleen M. Beck and Hilary L.
Green. Desert Research Institute, University of Nevada, 2004.

Oral history interview with Roger Andersen by Mary Palevsky. Nevada Test
Site Oral History Project, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, September 20, 2005.

Oral history interview with T. D. Barnes by Mary Palevsky. Nevada Test Site
Oral History Project, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, January 12, 2007.

Oral history: Conversations with Colonel Hervey Stockman, by Ann Paden
and Earl Haney, 2004-2005.

Web Sites

• Central Intelligence Agency archives f http://www.foia.cia. gov /I Central
Intelligence Agency archives

• Department of Energy archives ( http ://www.osti. gov/opennet/index.j sp l

• U.S. Air Force Archives f http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-
records/groups/342.html l

• G-2 Intelligence Archives ( http://www.dami.army.pentagon.mil /)

• Office of the Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Nuclear
Matters ( http://www.acq.osd.mil/ncbdp/nm/nuclearchronologyl.html )

• The National Security Archive ( http ://www.g wu.edu/~nsarchi v /f

• Federation of American Scientists f http://www.fas.org /l

• GlobalSecurity.org ( http ://www.globalsecuritv.org /l

• Roadrunners Internationale ( http://roadrunnersinternationale.com /)

• The Long War Journal f http://www.longwarjournal.org /l

• JT3 NTTR—Nevada Test and Training Range
( http://www.jt3.com/ne range. asp )

Documentary Films and Television

The Day After Trinity, 1981.

Return with Honor: American Experience, 1999.

Forgiving Dr. Mengele, 2006.

The Search for Dr. Mengele, 1985.

Vietnam: A Television History, PBS, 1983.

America’s Atomic Bomb Tests, 1997.

Hearts and Minds, 1974.

The Nuremberg Trials: American Experience, 2005.

Radio Bikini, 1987.

Atomic Journeys: Welcome to Ground Zero, 2000.

Modern Marvels: The Manhattan Project, History Channel, 2002.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, 2003.
The Living Weapon: American Experience, 2006.

“Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs in American History.” ABC, February 24,
2005.

Walter Cronkite. “UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy?” CBS News, May 10, 1966.

Groom Lake, Nevada, in 1917. Once little more than a dry lake bed in the
southern Nevada desert, what is now known as Area 51 has become the most
secretive military facility in the world. (Special Collections, University of

Nevada-Reno)

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From up on top of the old Groom Mine in 1917, looking down. Not until the
1950s would the federal government take over the dry lake bed and adjacent
land. (Special Collections, University of Nevada-Reno)

Vannevar Bush, age eighty, receives the Atomic Pioneer Award from President
Nixon at a White House ceremony in 1970. Other recipients are (from left to
right) Glenn T. Seaborg, the man who co-discovered plutonium; James B.
Conant of the National Defense Research Committee; and General Leslie R.
Groves, who was the commander of the Manhattan Project but took orders from
Vannevar Bush. (U.S. Department of Energy)

Colonel Richard S. Leghorn during Operation Crossroads, at Bikini Atoll in the
Marshall Islands, July 1946. Leghorn led the mission to photograph the nuclear
explosions from the air, and he is credited with the concept of “overhead,” which
led to spy planes and satellites. (Collection of Richard S. Leghorn/Army Air

Forces)

The Baker bomb at Operation Crossroads, July 25, 1946, was 21 kilotons, one
and a half times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Baker’s
underwater fireball produced a “chimney” of radioactive water 6,000 feet tall
and 2,000 feet wide. Stalin had spies at the event. (Library of Congress)

The black device attached to this balloon in Area 9 of the Nevada Test Site is a
74-kiloton atomic bomb code-named Hood, the largest atmospheric nuclear
weapon ever exploded in the United States. Standing on a ladder minutes before
this photograph was taken on July 5, 1957, A1 O’Donnell put the final touches
on the bomb’s firing system. Area 51 is over the hill to the right of the device.

(Collection of Alfred O’Donnell/National Nuclear Security Administration)

A column of radioactive smoke rises from the Hood bomb. To the right of the
mushroom stem the landscape can be seen on fire. Approximately one hour after
the bomb went off, security guard Richard Mingus drove through ground zero to
set up a guard post at the Area 51 guard gate, directly over the burning hills.
(National Nuclear Security Administration)

Operation Paperclip scientists at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1946. Until 1945, these
men worked for Adolf Hitler, but as soon as the war ended these “rare minds”
began working for the American military and various intelligence organizations,
the details of which remain largely classified. Rocket scientist Wernher von
Braun is in the front row, seventh from the right with his hand in his pocket.
(National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

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Nazi Dr. Walther Riedel after his capture by the U.S. Army in 1945. Unsmiling
in this never-before-published file photograph, Riedel is missing teeth, which
had been knocked out by U.S. soldiers while questioning him about his role in
Hitler’s “bacteria bomb.” (National Archives)

Alleged to be Stalin’s secret UFO study team are (standing left to right) Sergei
Korolev, chief missile designer and inventor of Sputnik; Igor Kurchatov, father
of Russia’s atomic bomb; and Mstislav Keldysh, mathematician, theoretician,
and space pioneer. (Collection of Museum of M. V. Keldysh, Russia)

This photograph of the all-wing Horten V appeared in the Secret G-2 Combined
Intelligence Objective Sub-Committee report “Horten Tailless Aircraft,” dated

May 1945. (National Archives)

The 1945 G-2 report on the Horten brothers airplanes included this photograph
of the unusually shaped Parabola. Two years later, after the crash of a foreign
disc-shaped aircraft in New Mexico, in July 1947, the Counter Intelligence
Corps embarked on a manhunt across Western Europe to locate the Horten
brothers and their so-called flying disc. (National Archives)

A German-designed V-2 rocket is hoisted up onto a U.S. Army test stand at the
White Sands Proving Ground, in New Mexico, on January 1, 1947. Five months
later one of the V-2s went off course. No one was killed, but the German
Paperclip scientists in charge of the rocket launch were put under investigation.

(NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center)

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Part of a U-2 coming out of a transport airplane at Area 51 in 1955. The CIA’s
first spy plane was so secret that Air Force pilots transporting it to Area 51, in
pieces inside larger airplanes, would fly to a set of coordinates over the Mojave
Desert and contact a UHF frequency called Sage Control for orders. Only when
the aircraft was a few hundred feet off the ground would runway lights flash on.

(Laughlin Heritage Foundation/CIA)

Early U-2s on the flight line at Area 51 in 1956, a worker standing on a wing.

(Laughlin Heritage Foundation/CIA)

Trailer Area Aa Sum Front Towar. Paved Flight Strip la Background.

Trailers at Area 51 where U-2 pilots like Hervey Stockman and Tony Bevacqua
slept while learning how to fly the CIA’s first spy plane. (Laughlin Heritage

Foundation/CIA)

A rare perspective on Area 51 looking northeast in 1955. The triangular
mountain peak (just right of center in the far distance) is Tikaboo Peak, the
single remaining location from where the curious can catch a faraway glimpse of
Area 51. (Laughlin Heritage Foundation/CIA)

Hervey Stockman left Princeton University to fly with the U.S. Army Air Corps
during World War II. In 1956, he was the first man to fly over the Soviet Union
in a U-2. He flew 310 combat missions in three wars. In June 1967 he was
involved in a midair crash over North Vietnam and became a POW for nearly six
years. (Collection of Colonel Hervey S. Stockman)

After the tragic death of U-2 pilot Robert Sieker on April 4, 1957, the flag at
Area 51 was flown at half-mast. (Laughlin Heritage Foundation/ClA)

The U-2 aloft, circa 1965. All indicators of ownership, including its former
NACA designation, have been removed. (Collection of Lockheed Martin)

A rare look at Building 82, inside the fabled Lockheed Skunk Works, circa 1957.
The world’s first anechoic chamber can be seen at the far rear of the room. Shoe¬
sized models of the CIA’s spy planes would be hung from the ceiling and tested.

(Collection of Lockheed Martin)

Area 13 sits inside Area 51 and was contaminated with plutonium in a 1957
“dirty bomb” test. This photograph, part of a set never released publicly before,
was taken during a 1960 Atomic Energy Commission investigation into theft of
a “hot” item stored there. After the dirty bomb test, someone had cut the fence,
ignored the “Warning Alpha Contamination” hazard signs, and stolen a 1952
model pickup truck that was contaminated with plutonium and scheduled for
burial in a hazardous waste pit. (National Nuclear Security Administration)

President Kennedy touring the NERVA nuclear facility at Area 25. The plan was
to build a nuclear-powered rocket ship to take men to Mars in the astonishingly
short time frame of 124 days. (Department of Energy)

While working on the nuclear space ship program, T. D. Barnes walked to work
each day through this 1,150-foot-long underground tunnel below Area 25.

(Department of Energy)

The Nuclear Rocket Test Facility at Jackass Flats, located in Area 25, seen here
from above sometime in the 1960s. Three test cells (ETS-1, E-MAD, and R-
MAD) were connected by a remote-controlled railroad that transported the
highly radioactive reactor between them. (Department of Energy)

The engine for the Mars rocket can be seen at the center of the Engine Test
Stand-1, positioned upside down to prevent it from taking off during testing.
Operating at 3680.6 degrees Fahrenheit meant the nuclear reactor inside the
engine needed to be cooled down by liquid hydrogen, contained in white
industrial dewars seen at right. (Department of Energy)

Moving the first A-12 to Area 51, over the Cajon Pass in California. The
transport crate had been disguised to look like a generic wide load. (CIA)

A full-scale mock-up of the Oxcart being assembled at Area 51 in 1959, even
before the CIA contract was officially secured. The facility had been deserted
after nuclear fallout shuttered the place in the summer of 1957. These Lockheed
Skunk Workers were among the earliest returnees. (Collection of Roadrunners

Internationale/CIA)

Setting up the legendary Area 51 pylon, or radar test pole. The radar antennas,
manned and monitored by EG&G, were located a mile away from the pole.
(Collection of Roadrunners Internationale/CIA)

Less than eight feet of the fifty-five-foot-long pole is visible here. The rest of the
pole is underground, below a concrete pad, and rises up from an underground
chamber built inside the desert floor. (Collection of Roadrunners

Internationale/CIA)

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Working at night meant less of a chance of being surveilled by Soviet spy
satellites. “Getting an aircraft up on the radar test pole took eighteen minutes. It
took another eighteen minutes to get it back down,” says Ed Lovick. “That left
only a set amount of time to shoot radar at it and take data recordings.” As soon
as technicians were done, they took the aircraft down and whisked it away into
its hangar. (Collection of Roadrunners Internationale/CIA)

Area 51 as seen from the air, circa 1964. This rare photograph has never been
published before. (Collection of Roadrunners Internationale)

Yucca Flat, which spans several Areas at the Nevada Test Site, is one of the most
bombed-out places on earth. In this photo taken during the winter months from a
helicopter above Area 10, the Sedan Crater can be seen in the forefront. A 104-
kiloton bomb was buried at a depth of 635 feet, and its detonation produced a
crater 1,280 feet wide and 320 feet deep, moving 12 million tons of radioactive
dirt in an instant and creating a hole that can be seen from space. (National

Nuclear Security Administration)

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Ed Lovick, at Skunk Works in the mid-1960s, with the waveguide, as he works
to reduce the radar cross section for the A-12 to meet the CIA’s demands.
(Collection of Edward Lovick/Lockheed Martin)

A-12 ejection-seat test on Groom Lake’s dry lake bed. (Collection of
Roadrunners Internationale/CIA)

The A-12 Oxcart hidden behind a barrier at Area 51. It took 2,400 Lockheed
Skunk Works machinists and mechanics to get a fleet of fifteen ready for the
CIA. Visible on either side of the aircraft are the uniquely adjustable inlet cones
that regulated airflow and allowed the CIA spy plane to cruise in afterburner and
reach peak speeds of Mach 3.29 by May 1965. (Lockheed Martin)

Richard Bissell, known best for his role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was the CIA
officer who built Area 51 from the ground up. In this rare photograph, he shakes
hands with CIA pilot Louis Schalk after the first flight of the A-12 Oxcart in
April 1962. Bissell had already resigned. (Lockheed Martin)

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The A-12 Oxcart lands on the runway at Area 51, April 1962. (Collection of

Roadrunners Internationale/CIA)

Charlie Trapp was chief of Rescue and Survival at Area 51 from 1962 to 1967. It
was in this H-43B helicopter that Trapp found the body of Oxcart pilot Walt Ray
and his airplane after a fatal crash. Trapp received the Air Medal for the twenty-
five-day operation. (Collection of Charles E. Trapp)

CIA pilot Ken Collins, in full flight gear, hanging above the Area 51 swimming
pool during ocean-survival training circa 1965. Charlie Trapp sits on the diving
board with a technician, name unknown. (Collection of Charles E. Trapp Jr.)

Radar station at the top of Bald Mountain. (Collection of Charles E. Trapp Jr.)

The A-12 trainer during a test flight. Note the two canopies, one for the
instructor pilot and another for the trainee. The A-12 trainer aircraft could not
reach the upper Mach numbers; CIA pilots experienced that remarkable feat on

their own. (CIA)

This CIA project, code-named Tagboard, was an Oxcart with a Mach 3 drone on
its back, circa 1965. To avoid confusion with the A-12, the mother ship was
designated M-21 (as in “mother”) and the drone was designated D-21 (as in
“daughter”). (Collection of Lockheed Martin)

Former U-2 spy plane pilot Tony Bevacqua flies over Hanoi in the fabled SR-71
Blackbird, the Air Force variant of the A-12 Oxcart. This reconnaissance
photograph shows an SA-2 missile being fired at Bevacqua from a ground
station below. It was the first time an SR-71 was ever fired upon. July 26, 1968.
(Collection of Tony Bevacqua/U.S. Air Force)

Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater served as commander of Area 51 during the Oxcart
program. Before he was put in charge of Project Oxcart, he served as
commander for the CIA’s Black Cat U-2 Squadron, which flew covert espionage
missions over China. Here he is with the YF-12, the attack version of the A-12
Oxcart, circa 1971. (Collection of Colonel Hugh Slater/U.S. Air Force)

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Area 51 as seen from above in 1968. (U.S. Geological Survey/Federation of

American Scientists)

Frank Murray started out flying chase on Project Oxcart in the F-101 Voodoo.
After CIA pilot Walt Ray was killed outside Area 51 during testing, General
Ledford asked Murray to take Ray’s place. Here Murray is on Kadena, Okinawa,
before a Black Shield mission over North Vietnam. (Collection of Frank

Murray)

Jack Weeks and Ken Collins preparing for a Black Shield mission over North
Vietnam, inside the command center on Kadena in 1968. A few months later
Weeks would be preseumed dead; no trace of the A-12 airplane or his body was

ever found. (Collection of Ken Collins)

Area 51 radars, circa 1968. T. D. Barnes and his fellow EG&G Special Project
engineers worked in the building at left. To pass the time when the Soviets
pinned them down with spy satellites, they pulled pranks, like painting odd¬
shaped aircraft on the tarmac and heating the images up with hair dryers to add a
heat signature. (Collection of Thornton D. Barnes/Roadrunners Internationale)

Radar antennae on the outskirts of Area 51, 1968. (Collection of Thornton D.

Barnes/Roadrunners Internationale)

T. D. Barnes, age nineteen, serving in Korea in 1956. A photo of his new bride,
Doris, sits on his desk in this photograph, as it still does in 2011. Barnes, a radar
expert, started working for the CIA in 1958. (Collection of Thornton D. Barnes)

The Beatty High Range, where radar expert T. D. Barnes worked for joint
NASA/CIA projects prior to his transfer to Area 51. From Beatty, Barnes could
track airplanes over at Groom Lake, sixty miles as the crow flies. (NASA)

A Russian MiG 21 inside a hangar at Area 51. The CIA borrowed one from the
Mossad, reverse engineered it, and then flew it in mock air battles over the
Nevada desert. This secret program, which took place in the winter of 1968, was
called Operation Have Doughnut and gave birth to the Navy’s fabled Top Gun
program. (Collection of Roadrunners Internationale/U.S. Air Force)

Apollo astronauts trained on the subsidence craters at the Nevada Test Site
before they went to the moon. Ernest “Ernie” Williams was their tour guide; he
helped CIA engineers locate the original water spring at Area 51. (Department of

Energy)

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Richard Mingus worked security at Area 51 and the Nevada Test Site for
decades. He is seen here during weapons training in 1979. (Collection of Richard
Mingus/National Nuclear Security Administration)

A Predator drone on the tarmac at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, June 2008.
Located just thirty miles south of Area 51, the airstrip here was formerly called
Indian Springs. It is where atomic sampling pilots once trained to fly through
mushroom clouds; where Dr. Edward Teller, “father of the H-bomb,” used to
land before atomic bomb tests; and where Bob Lazar says he was taken and
interrogated after getting caught trespassing on Groom Lake Road. (U.S. Air

Force/Steve Huckvale)

From Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, U.S. Air Force pilots fly drones over Iraq
and Afghanistan using remote control. (U.S. Air Force/author collection)

Site of former EG&G offices on the edge of downtown Las Vegas as it looked in

2009. (Author collection)

Operation Harass and the search for the Horten brothers netted this sketch of a
possible advanced Horten aircraft design. (Department of Defense)

Walter Horten holding a scale model of the Horten 10B in Baden-Baden,
Germany, in 1987. (Collection of David Myhra)

Reimar Horten in Argentina, 1985. (Collection of David Myhra)

The Operation Crossroads 1946 commemorative yearbook depicts the Ros-well
Army Air Base as the military facility from which the opening shot in the Cold
War was fired. (Collection of Richard S. Leghorn/Army Air Forces )

Contents

Front Cover Image

Welcome

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: The Secret City

Chapter 1 The Riddle of Area 51
Chapter 2 Imagine a War of the Worlds

Chapter 3 The Secret Base
Chapter 4 The Seeds of a Conspiracy

Chapter 5 The Need-to-Know

Chapter 6 Atomic Accidents

Chapter 7 From Ghost Town to Boomtown

Chapter 8 Cat and Mouse Becomes Downfall

Chapter 9 The Base Builds Back Up

Chapter 10 Wizards of Science. Technology, and Diplomacy

Chapter 11 What Airplane?

Chapter 12 Covering Up the Cover-Up

Chapter 13 Dull. Dirty, and Dangerous Requires Drones

Chapter 14 Drama in the Desert
Chapter 15 The Ultimate Boys’ Club

Chapter 16 Operation Black Shield and the Secret History of the USS Pueblo

Chapter 17 The MiGs of Area 51

Chapter 18 Meltdown

Chapter 19 The Lunar-Landing Conspiracy and Other Legends of Area 51

Chapter 20 From Camera Bays to Weapons Bays, the Air Force Takes Control

Chapter 21 Revelation

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Author Interviews and Bibliography

Books and Monographs

Photo Inserts
About the Author

Copyright

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Annie Jacobsen is a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine and
an investigative reporter whose work has also appeared in the National Review
and the Dallas Morning News. Her two-part series “The Road to Area 51” in the
Los Angeles Times Magazine was widely read. A graduate of Princeton
University, Annie Jacobsen lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.

Copyright

Copyright © 2011 by Anne M. Jacobsen

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.

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Hachette Book Group
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First eBook Edition: May 2011

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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not
owned by the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-316-19385-6

AREA 51

AN UNCENSORED

HISTORY OF AMERICA'S

TOP SECRET

MILITARY

\NNIE JACOBSEN